Speaking out for the first time since ditching Fox News after nearly two decades, Chris Wallace said it had become “increasingly unsustainable” for him to remain with the conservative cable news giant as the network’s stars were unleashed to push out election denialism and Jan. 6 trutherism.
In an extensive interview with the New York Times that was published Sunday, the 74-year-old venerable newsman also confirmed earlier reports that he complained to Fox News management about Tucker Carlson’s docu-series Patriot Purge, which baselessly suggested that the Capitol riots were a “false flag” operation to justify a new “war on terror” against conservatives.
“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox,” Wallace told the Times.
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“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” he added. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable. I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”
Wallace, who shocked the media world last December when he suddenly ditched Fox News to host a daily interview show for rival CNN’s new streaming service, bemoaned the hard-right shift at Fox News following former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Notably, this included expanding the network’s opinion programming, firing its longtime political editor who defended the network’s early and accurate election night projection of Arizona, and the increased prominence of Carlson. Prior to the election, Wallace had loyally defended Fox News to its detractors for years while refusing to publicly condemn its more strident opinion hosts by name, even as he famously pushed back against their rhetoric on the air.
“Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox,” Wallace noted. “And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”
At the same time, the former Fox News Sunday moderator acknowledged that critics would say that it took him too long to finally call it quits.
“Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point,” he declared. “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.’”
As for the Kremin-friendly rhetoric pushed by Carlson and other Fox News personalities since the launch of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Wallace—who said he “wanted to get out of politics” when he quit his Sunday show—wasn’t in the mood to pick any new fights.
“One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me,” he stated, adding that “there has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision.”
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
