Chris Wallace bluntly said he had enough with Fox News’ “conspiracy” and “lies,” so he left for CNN in 2021. (Watch the video below.)
In a Mediaite interview released Tuesday, the longtime anchor explained how he reached the tipping point at the conservative news channel after 18 years there.
Wallace said a “firewall” between Fox News anchors and its opinionated personalities crumbled during the 2020 presidential election. The network’s calling of Arizona, a swing state, in Joe Biden’s favor and the subsequent backlash and viewer defection it suffered changed the culture, he said.
The erosion continued as Fox News downplayed the Jan. 6 Capitol attack after amplifying Donald Trump and his allies’ false claims that the election was stolen.
“I saw a poll that said that 70% of Republicans did not think that Joe Biden is the legitimate president,” Wallace said. “That’s horrifying. When you talk about why did you leave and why was it unsustainable? I had no problem with conservative opinion any more than I do with liberal opinion. But what I do have a problem with is conspiracy, lies. The truth is non-negotiable. It’s not something that you can sit there and shade or in any way play with. And I saw way too much of that happening.”
Wallace, who was promoting his new book, “Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days that Changed America’s Politics Forever,” also expressed no sympathy whatsoever for his old network having to dish out $787 million to Dominion to settle a lawsuit after Fox News fraudulently claimed the company’s balloting machines were rigged against Trump.
“I viewed it as I’m glad to see that somebody is paying for playing with the truth,” he said. “And for very much breaking what I think is our almost sacred charter, which is to inform people, not to misinform people. To the degree that Fox was scared by the cost of calling Arizona correctly and people going to other more conservative outlets, there’s also a cost to lying and to misrepresenting. And I was happy to see that cost was being exacted.”
Fast-forward to 21:10 for many of Wallace’s comments about his Fox News tenure:
Wallace gave a more diplomatic take on his exit to The New York Times in 2022.
“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox,” he said.
“When people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable,” he added.