Chris Wallace on Fox News exit: 'I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming'
Ahead of the March 29 launch of his new CNN+ show, Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, veteran newscaster Chris Wallace is opening up about his decision to move on from Fox News after 18 years at the network. Wallace, 74, announced his departure during the Dec. 12 broadcast of Fox News Sunday, telling viewers that it would be his last appearance on the show he'd hosted since 2003. His hiring at the CNN+ streaming service was confirmed soon afterwards.
Though he described his tenure at Fox News as "a wild ride" in his parting message, Wallace's new interview with New York Times is shedding light on his dissatisfaction with the network, home to conservative pundits including Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox," Wallace tells the Times, pointing to the framing of the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that followed as something of a breaking point. He confirms that he complained to Fox News management about fellow network personality Carlson and his Patriot Purge documentary, which leaned into baseless conspiracy theories that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a "false flag" operation designed to vilify right-wingers.
“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” the veteran journalist, known for his moderate appeal, shared. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”
He adds, "Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”
That discomfort prompted Wallace to seek out other opportunities; he tells the Times that he "spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job."
That place ended up being CNN+, which, by dint of being a streaming service rather than a live studio, had a certain appeal to the longtime Sunday morning news host. "Doing a Sunday show on the incremental change from week to week in the Build Back Better plan began to lose its attraction," he notes.
In his final Fox News Sunday message, Wallace told viewers that he wanted "to try something new, to go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in" in terms of his "new adventure." Indeed, Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? will see him having "intimate, thoughtful" conversations not just with lawmakers, but also cultural personalities such as William Shatner and Judy Collins, in a format inspired by Larry King and Charlie Rose.
Though he admits that the recent departure of CNN boss Jeff Zucker is "not ideal," Wallace hasn't "second-guessed" his decision to leave Fox, nor does he care to comment about Carlson and other Fox News personalities and their controversial statements about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me," he says now. Wallace does acknowledge that some might see his exit from the network as "too little, too late."
“Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point,” he says, adding, “I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris.’”
