LI's Connell McShane joins NewsNation

A native Long Islander now resides at NewsNation each weekday afternoon, as former Fox Business anchor Connell McShane moves to the recently created 24-hour cable news network to host the 3-5 p.m. news show “NewsNation Now.”

McShane, 46, joined Fox Business as a reporter when it launched in 2007, and eventually became co-anchor of three shows. “I didn't feel like I fit there anymore as a straight news reporter after the 2020 election and I wanted to be somewhere where I fit in,” he tells Newsday from his NewsNation office in the former Daily News Building in midtown Manhattan. “I wanted to be somewhere where my values matched up with the mission statement of where I was working. And so when my contract expired earlier this year, I left. And to be honest, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do next.”

Over the summer, NewsNation offered him “a two-hour, fact-based, unbiased news program in New York, and I thought this would be a perfect fit.” NewsNation — previously the legacy cable network WGN America before rebranding in 2021 with five hours of nightly news, expanding to 24 hours this past April — touts itself as offering unbiased reporting.

While business news does not immediately seem prone to biased reporting, Fox Business has a 7.19 rightward deviation on Ad Fontes Media’s Interactive Media Bias Chart. “Fox Business and Fox News [with an 11.53 rightward deviation] are both under Fox News Media, so those two networks are closely aligned and run in the same building by the same people,” McShane says. “I think Fox Business and Fox News are much more closely aligned than some of the other properties,” such as Fox Sports.

McShane comes at his perspective after a lifetime in journalism. Born at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park and initially raised in Bellerose, Queens, the only child moved with his parents — retired New York Telephone technician Connell McShane Sr. and retired Montessori teacher’s aide Helen — to Plainview as a third-grader. After graduating from St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington in 1995, he went on to Fordham University in the Bronx, where he got his start in sports broadcasting at the school's radio station.

While a student he also did unpaid play-by-play for Massachusetts’ minor league Pittsfield Mets — now the Brooklyn Cyclones — for a summer, and after graduation became a reporter at the media company Bloomberg, including covering the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; reporting live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; and anchoring a syndicated radio show. In addition to his later stint at Fox Business, he was Charles McCord’s successor as news anchor and Friday host of WABC / 770 AM radio’s “Imus in the Morning” from 2011 to 2017.

He and his wife, Renee McShane, co-founder and chief operating officer of the consultancy Reimagined Teaching, now live in Stewart Manor and are parents to daughters Caroline, 18, and Lucy, 20, both college students, and Jack, 23, who works for CBS Sports.

And his own parents still live nearby. His 83-year-old Irish immigrant father, he says, “has cable so that he can watch NewsNation. So,” McShane jokes, "at least we have one viewer every day!”