Chris Wallace has opened up about his decision to leave Fox News last December, explaining that he “no longer felt comfortable with the programming” at the media giant as time went on.
In a New York Times interview published Sunday, the veteran TV anchor, 74 — who hosted Fox News Sunday and served at Fox News for eighteen years and has now moved on to CNN’s new subscription streaming service CNN+ — elaborated that he found working at Fox after the 2020 presidential election to be “unsustainable.”
“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Wallace said about his decision to leave. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6, an insurrection — I found that unsustainable.”
The journalist added: “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.”
Wallace acknowledged that some people may have “drawn the line earlier,” or come to the decision at a different time. “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,’” he told the Times.
The journalist also said that he “spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”
Wallace, who covered five presidential elections at Fox News and interviewed numerous political leaders, announced his exit late last year, sharing that he was ready to try something new and “go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in.” He shared at the time that he was looking forward to the “new freedom and flexibility streaming affords in interviewing major figures across the news landscape — and finding new ways to tell stories.”
CNN+ will have Wallace as the host of the daily interview series. Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, running from Mondays through Thursdays, in which he hopes to have “the kind of intimate, thoughtful conversation where we forget we’re on camera in a studio.” The show debuts Tuesday.
