Chris Wallace: Life at Fox News Became ‘Unsustainable’

“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox.”

The NY Times reports Chris Wallace uttered those words matter-of-factly, in between bites of a Sweetgreen salad at his new desk inside the Washington bureau of CNN, the network he joined in January after nearly two decades at Fox News.

For those on the left who admired him, and those on the right who doubted him, it’s a statement that was a long time coming.

A down-the-middle outlier at Fox News who often confounded conservatives by contradicting the network’s right-wing stars, Wallace was also one of the channel’s fiercest defenders, disappointing liberals who hoped he might denounce colleagues like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

But in December, the 74-year-old Wallace issued a final verdict: He was done. In a surprise move, he declined to renew his contract as host of “Fox News Sunday” and jumped to archrival CNN. His daily interview show — “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” — starts Tuesday on the new CNN+ streaming service.

“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Mr. Wallace said in his first extensive interview 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.”

“I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job,” he added.

The anchor was eager to describe what attracted him to his new gig: excitement about CNN+, the more freewheeling format of streaming TV — “I don’t have to say, you know, ‘Wolf Blitzer starts right now at 6:59:59’” — and the opportunity to expand beyond politics. In early episodes, he discusses space travel with the “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, asks the former Disney boss Bob Iger about meeting the pope, and at one point sings a warbling duet with the songstress Judy Collins.

But 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 Carlson who downplayed the Jan. 6 riot.

He confirmed reports that he was so alarmed by 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.

Wallace said his new CNN+ series, which airs at 6 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, was inspired by the work of famed interviewers like Larry King and Charlie Rose. (His father, the “60 Minutes” legend Mike Wallace, hosted a versatile interview program of his own in the late 1950s, with guests ranging from Henry Kissinger to the actress Jean Seberg.