Veteran newsman Chris Wallace took a swipe at his former Fox News colleague, Tucker Carlson, while also saying he doesn’t have a problem with Fox paying $787.5 million to settle the defamation lawsuit from voting software company Dominion regarding election lies spread on its airwaves.
Wallace, now a CNN host after having left Fox in late 2021, appeared for the first time Tuesday on MSNBC’s The Beat, where anchor Ari Melber reread Carlson’s opinions about his then-colleague—text messages that were revealed as part of that lawsuit.
Carlson’s anger at Wallace stemmed not only from Wallace’s moderation of the first 2020 presidential debate, but his refusal to be a mere sounding board for Trump’s election lies.
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“We devote our lives to building an audience,” Carlson wrote in one exchange with Laura Ingraham, “and they let Chris Wallace…wreck it.”
Carlson has made public jabs at Wallace during his post-Fox activities as well, telling ally Donald Trump last summer that he’s a “bitchy little man.”
“Your response?” Melber asked.
“Well,” Wallace replied, “I’m employed, and Tucker really isn’t anymore. So that’s part of my response.”
Carlson’s final Fox News broadcast was last April. In it, he confidently told viewers “we’ll be back.” After that didn’t happen, he has been hosting his own show and interview series.
“I had a very good 18-year run at Fox, and they never messed with me the whole time,” continued Wallace, who explained that the 2020 election brought a certain change to the network, and not for the better.
Wallace cited the network’s correct call of Arizona for Joe Biden—a move that Carlson and other opinion hosts fumed about. (Chris Stirewalt, the network’s politics editor who defended that call, was subsequently ousted just before Biden took office.)
“A lot of Trump supporters were very upset with us,” Wallace said. “And they began going to other news avenues like Newsmax that were even further to the right. I sensed a change in Fox at that point, that there was less interest even in the news side in sticking to the facts, sticking to the truth, and more in telling that audience—to try to win them back—what they wanted to hear.”
“And they paid a big price for it,” Wallace continued, alluding to the unprecedented Dominion settlement. “I have to say I’m not unhappy that Fox had to pay $787 million, because there ought to be a price to pay when you don’t tell the truth and you deliberately misinform people about things that the evidence in that case showed that higher ups at Fox knew wasn’t true.”
Melber followed up: “You thought the hefty penalty was a good thing for trying to correct some of their mistakes?”
“Look, there’s a price to pay,” Wallace said. “There are laws about libel and defamation, and clearly Fox settled because they thought they were going to lose the case and have to pay even more.”
