“After 18 years this will be my last Fox News Sunday“: Moderator Chris Wallace said goodbye to his audience in the usual factual tone. And so one of the last critical moderator voices left the Trump-related broadcaster. The 74-year-old had Fox News Sunday Acquired in 2003 and has become one of the most prominent faces on the Murdoch network. In his last broadcast he now declares: “I was free to report, to the best of my knowledge and belief, about the stories that I consider important in order to bring the leaders of our country to account.” Where is he going The big competitor, of all places.
The transmitter CNN reported on Monday, Wallace decided not to renew the four-year contract, which is now expiring. Wallace himself announced: “I am ready for a new adventure.” This new adventure is called CNN +. The CNN streaming service is scheduled to start in 2022, and Wallace will get a show there, with which he will probably be a little less out of the ordinary in the new framework than he was previously.
Wallace received a lot of media coverage for an interview with Donald Trump. In the summer of 2020, in the middle of the election campaign, the then president met with the presenter of his declared favorite broadcaster. But unlike in other Fox conversations, he was confronted with tough fact checks. Wallace presented him with statistics and classifications; the cornered Trump insulted the journalist in front of the camera as “fake news”.
Wallace may be the best-known journalist to quit Fox News, but by no means the first. That may be due to the recent refinements of the program. The station experienced an unusually sharp drop in its ratings after the presidential election because it had reported early on that Biden would win the election – much to the displeasure of viewers, who were too keen to cling to Trump’s “stolen election” lie. Political editor Chris Stirewalt, who predicted Joe Biden would win in Arizona, was even fired in January.
Two commentators quit after a Fox special on the Capitol Tower
In order to keep the right-wing conservative viewers, Fox relied even more strongly on opinion formats with commentators from the political spectrum at the same time as Joe Biden took office. To the delight of Trump fans, Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, is also on the Fox payroll as a contributor. However, other key voices that were not clearly part of the Republican spectrum withdrew in May. Juan Williams hosted his talk show The Five away. Donna Brazile left Fox News. The former Democratic Party leader was hired as a dissenting vote by Fox in 2019.
There was particular turmoil in November. It was about the three-part Fox special Patriot Purge, which suggested the January 6th Capitol storm may have been orchestrated by the FBI or other secret powerhouses to harm Trump voters and the supposedly “true patriots.” Commentators Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg turned their backs on Fox after it aired. Chris Wallace is also said to have complained. According to a media report he wrote a letter to the top of the station together with a colleague.