(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Former Fox News host Chris Wallace lashed out against his former network in an unhinged Press Club interview that accused the right-leaning network of “conspiracy and lies” while seeming overly generous toward his current employer, CNN, Mediaite reported.
Wallace, the son of revered CBS News standard-bearer Mike Wallace, has now spent approximately five decades in the media industry, holding positions at NBC, ABC and Fox before taking up his current post at CNN in 2021.
Nonetheless, he has failed to escape the long shadow cast by his famous dad—who rarely, if ever, tipped his hand as to his own political inclinations.
The younger Wallace, as the longtime host of Fox News Sunday, managed to surpress his leftist tendencies under a facade of what many assumed was objectivity to compensate for Fox’s right-leaning tendencies.
But his exit from the network following the 2020 election revealed just how out of touch he was with the prevailing public attitudes.
“I had no problem with conservative opinion any more than I do with liberal opinion,” Wallace claimed in his interview with Mediaite editor-in-chief Aidan McLaughlin.
However, as the self-declared arbiter of “truth,” Wallace suggested it was up to him alone to determine what the acceptable views were within those two categories.
“The truth is non-negotiable,” he decreed.
Wallace said Fox’s support for then-President Donald Trump through the highly contentious 2020 vote-counting process, and lingering skepticism over the legitimacy of President Joe Biden, were “horrifying” to him.
And here is,
the greatest election theft in United States history,
GEORGIA: +96,000 MAIL-IN-BALLOTS cast, but no record of ever being returned,
PENNSYLVANIA: +766,000 MAIL-IN-BALLOTS cast, just appears out of nowhere,
ARIZONA: +733,000 MAIL-IN-BALLOTS cast, just vanished… https://t.co/eC1jSC7luL pic.twitter.com/doc5i1YLz4
— 🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 (@Real_RobN) October 9, 2024
As a result, the legacy-media veteran said that he was “glad” to see that Fox News was “paying for playing with the truth” following the network’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
It is unclear how much Fox News actually lost in the settlement. BlackRock—a company that holds financial stake in Dominion-linked CrowdStrike (although, as leftist media have emphatically pointed out, it holds no stake in Dominion itself)—bought up a significant interest in Fox just prior to the settlement.
The acquisition suggests the multi-trillion-dollar left-wing investment brokerage, notorious for its ESG practices, may simply have laundered money through the lawsuit from one of its companies to another for the purpose of manipulating public perception into thinking Fox had admitted to false reporting.
Nonetheless, for Wallace, who suffered public humilation when his job was downsized shortly after his arrival at CNN, the lawfare defeat offered sweet vindication to his sour grapes.
Wallace also slammed fellow former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson—who was mysteriously fired by Fox shortly after the Dominion settlement—for his pursuit of “fame, attention, notoriety.”
Comparing himself to Carlson, Wallace claimed, “I want to tell the truth. I want to inform people.”
“I think it’s amazing what people will do to find an audience and I think it’s sad.”
Chris Wallace shares his candid thoughts on former Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson.
Watch the full interview on Mediaite YouTube ▶️ https://t.co/ZbdxmFXzMt pic.twitter.com/JQF98VU0JG
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) October 9, 2024
It was the latest salvo in what has become a bitter grudge between the former colleagues.
In an interview that smashed viewership records on Twitter, Carlson and Trump swapped barbs about Wallace, with Carlson calling him a “bitchy little man.”
President Trump and Tucker Carlson take turns trashing Chris Wallace:
Trump: "He wanted to be Mike but he didn't have the talent."
Tucker: "He's a bitchy little man."
Trump: "He was guarding Biden." pic.twitter.com/I7oPN84m5k
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) August 24, 2023
Ultimately, Wallace said he was better off at CNN than at Fox because he felt more at home with fellow moderates like Jim Acosta, Jake Tapper and Brian Stelter as the network strives to fortify democracy ahead of the 2024 election.
“Fox on the right, MSNBC on the left, CNN is somewhere in the center and very happily so,” he claimed.
Wallace’s optimistic comments come despite financial turmoil at the struggling media giant. The company spent the summer cutting departments, slashing budgets and laying off employees.
But Wallace insisted that CNN makes “a lot of money” even though it routinely underperforms in ratings.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
