Chris Wallace said that he “no longer felt comfortable” with the programming at Fox News, which prompted him to leave the network in December after working there as an anchor for nearly two decades.
In an interview published Sunday in the New York Times, he elaborated on his decision to leave his Fox News Sunday show for the network’s rival media company, CNN. Wallace’s new interview show—Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace—will begin airing on CNN’s new streaming service Tuesday.
“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Wallace told the Times. “But when people start to question the truth—Who won the 2020 election? Was January 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.”
Throughout his time at Fox, the 74-year-old broadcaster became known as one of the conservative network’s key voices that challenged GOP lawmakers and former President Donald Trump. However, he said that after the 2020 presidential election, the environment at Fox News became increasingly difficult to navigate.
In that time period, the network added an additional hour of right-wing opinion broadcasting, fired a political editor who projected Trump’s election loss in Arizona, and elevated hosts who downplayed the January 6 riot, according to the Times.
Wallace also told the Times that he complained to the network’s management about Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s documentary Patriot Purge, which advanced a conspiracy theory that the January 6 attack was a “false flag” operation.
“Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox,” he said. “And since November of 2020, that just became increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”
“Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point,” he continued. “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.’”
Wallace said his new program on CNN is inspired by the work of other famous interviewers, including Larry King and Charlie Rose. In announcing his departure from Fox News in December, Wallace said he was proud of the “community” he built with the network, but that he was looking to “go beyond politics.”
Wallace told the Times that he has not once regretted his choice to leave Fox News.
“One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me,” he said, adding, “there has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision.”
Newsweek contacted Fox News on Sunday, but the network declined to comment on Wallace’s latest interview.
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