Former “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace said working at Fox News became “unsustainable” in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election in an exclusive interview released Sunday.
“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Wallace told the New York Times. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 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.”
Wallace announced his departure from the network in December to join CNN’s new streaming network, CNN+. He described his former employer’s shift in encouraging former President Donald Trump’s election fraud claims by replacing anchor Martha MacCallum’s “The Story” with the more conservative “Jesse Watters Primetime,” and laying off Chris Stirewalt, the political editor who first projected then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona, the Times reported.
Chris Wallace on leaving Fox News:
“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.” https://t.co/fDPseHftRT
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 27, 2022
Wallace also opposed Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge,” a three-part documentary exploring how the Biden administration used the January 6 Capitol riots to depict conservatives as terrorists. (RELATED: ‘Why Didn’t You Build, Forgive Me, A Wall?’ Chris Wallace Confronts Mayorkas On ‘Flood’ Of Migrants At The Border)
“Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox,” he continued. “And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”
He told the Times of his intention to switch from political coverage to separate topics that include sports and the arts. He described how covering political topics such as Build Back Better “began to lose its attraction.”
“There has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision,” he said.
The former host said he was “obviously unhappy” that former CNN President Jeff Zucker resigned over his undisclosed relationship with chief marketing officer Allison Gollust, who served as the communications director for former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.