Expressing concern on Monday that the departure of veteran anchor Chris Wallace would further radicalize Fox News, the hosts of The View asked if the channel is now just the “Tucker Carlson Fake News Network.”
Noting that “many in the news media world were surprised” to see Wallace jump from Fox to CNN’s new streaming service this week, moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked her View colleagues how they thought the consummate newsman’s exit would impact Fox News.
“You mean QAnon News?” co-host Joy Behar quipped. “We can now call it Trump News. Just call it Trump News.”After the liberal firebrand said that Wallace’s 18-year tenure at Fox News “almost” gave the channel “some legitimacy,” co-host Sara Haines mentioned that it was a “big win for CNN” to pull Wallace away from Fox.
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Guest host and CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter, serving as the token conservative at the table, asserted that Wallace “was in a very difficult position at Fox News” due to many of the network’s opinion hosts and commentators downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and amplifying former president Donald Trump’s election fraud lies.
“But everyone in the media after we saw what happened on January 6 should seriously question who they should choose to elevate them to their platforms,” the Never-Trump pundit declared. “Because anyone that enabled the big election lie that led to destruction and the breach of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 for the explicit purpose of interfering with the peaceful power of transfer should seriously rethink what they're doing!”
Behar, meanwhile, said Carpenter should tell that to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox News owners who are “complicit in destroying America.”
Eventually, co-host Sunny Hostin weighed in, praising Wallace as “talented” and a “straight news guy” who has always been “very measured.” At the same time, Hostin said these traits likely meant that Wallace was not “well received by a lot of Fox News viewers.”
Wondering aloud where the right-wing network’s audience will get its actual news from going forward, Hostin pointed out that other hard news journalists such as Shepard Smith and Kristin Fisher have left the network in recent years. Additionally, she noted that two longtime contributors recently ditched Fox News over objections to Tucker Carlson’s revisionist Jan. 6 docu-series Patriot Purge, which pushes the baseless theory that the Capitol riots were a “false flag” operation orchestrated by the federal government.
“So to your question, Whoopi, what does it become now? Is it the Tucker Carlson Fake News Network?” Hostin asked, echoing the sentiments of other media observers.
The rest of the panel would then question whether anyone else at Fox News would be able to push back against the network’s increasingly extremist direction, adding that it can be “very uncomfortable if you’re a more measured person” at the network.
“They will find another person who will fill in the spot who will take millions and millions of dollars and go against his own real-truth politics,” Behar concluded. “You’ll see. People can be bought, left and right.”
