Chris Wallace trashes Fox News: 'I wanted to put all of that behind me'

In an interview with the New York Times as he renews his career at CNN, former Fox News host Chris Wallace explained that he felt he had to leave his former employer because he felt the network had gone off the rails following the election of Donald Trump and grew worse after the 2020 election.

Speaking with the Times' Michael Grynbaum, the venerable 74-year-old newsman who spent 18 years at Fox was blunt in his assessment of the conservative network, stating, "I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox.”

According to Wallace, whose Fox News Sunday show drew viewers for his no-nonsense questioning of lawmakers, he decided to leave because he didn't see the path the network was taking to his liking -- particularly after the 2020 election.

Asked why he departed his longtime home, Wallace explained, "I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” before admitting, "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,” he added.

"Mr. Wallace also acknowledged that he felt a shift at Fox News in the months after Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020 — a period when the channel ended its 7 p.m. newscast, fired the political editor who helped project a Trump loss in Arizona on election night, and promoted hosts like Mr. Carlson who downplayed the Jan. 6 riot," the Times report states. "He confirmed reports that he was so alarmed by Mr. Carlson’s documentary 'Patriot Purge' — which falsely suggested the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a 'false flag' operation intended to demonize conservatives — that he complained directly to Fox News management."

According to the report, Wallace refused to talk about Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and instead stated, "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.”

“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.’”

Speaking of his abrupt exit, he maintained, "One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me ... there has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision.”

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