Chris Wallace Gave Up On Journalism; And It Was Time For Him To Go

Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, announced this morning that he’ll be leaving Fox after an 18-year run. Wallace will be joining CNN as a part of their new streaming service. I’ve watched more of Wallace’s show than any other political program over the past decade. But to put it in dating terms, this is a relationship that has ended badly.

It started in 2012. I had been burned out from regular political talk shows, but decided to start watching one of the Sunday programs, something to at least get an overview of the week. I wanted to watch Wallace. I knew he didn’t toe the party line at Fox News. That was precisely why I wanted him. I didn’t need a news anchor that would only serve up confirmation bias or simply parrot the same talking points I was already hearing.

For a while, things were good. I appreciated Wallace’s confrontational approach with all his guests and determination to get answers. And there were times it changed my mind, like in 2015 when I became more supportive of the Obama Administration’s handling of the Syrian refugee crisis because of information he elicited from guests or through fair questions that Republican critics couldn’t answer.

After Donald Trump’s stunning victory on Election Night 2016, people, including in my social circle, were wondering whether Trump would change—be it for good or bad. I referred them to Wallace’s quote that memorable night “70-year-old billionaires who have just pulled the biggest political upset in history aren’t likely to be into self-examination.”

As the years passed, I started to wear down on the show a little bit. But to continue the dating analogy, it was more me than Wallace. The confrontational style takes its toll on me. I prefer a search for common ground. There was one interview Wallace had with Jay Sekulow, a member of Trump’s legal team, in 2017, that turned into a complete train wreck. Essentially both the host and the guest played the game of “who’s is bigger” with each other and it got tiresome.

At that point, I moved on, but I bore no ill will toward Wallace. I was just ready for something a little different and I was in the middle of a much bigger life change anyway where a Sunday morning show was a harder schedule fit. I still didn’t sympathize when Trump supporters, including the president himself, repeatedly complained about Wallace.

In fact, it was a couple nights before the first presidential debate in September 2020, when I was talking to two such supporters and they were griping about Wallace’s selection as moderater. My response--“Wallace will play it straight.”

Famous last words.

I don’t blame Wallace for the fact that the debate turned into a food fight. Trump bears his share of responsibility for that. The president wasn’t completely at fault, but many of us throughout the country were virtually begging Trump to let Biden talk—if only so the public could see just how dumb and out of it the man who is now Commander-in-Chief really is. And in fact, Trump himself admitted to author Mollie Hemingway that as soon as he (Trump) entered backstage after the debate, his teenage son Barron confronted him and said “Dad, you were awful.”

All of that can be true and it is true. But it doesn’t justify what Chris Wallace did at one fateful threshold in that debate.

Trump sought to pivot the debate to focus on the business dealings of the Biden Family, specifically that of Joe’s son Hunter. A laptop that Hunter carelessly left at a repair store and never picked up had been turned over to both the FBI and to Rudy Giuliani.

The laptop contained damning information about Hunter’s business dealings. He was using access to his father to influence peddle with foreign governments—including China. What’s more, there was an email that explicitly said that 10 percent of the profit was for “The Big Guy.” It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out who the The Big Guy is.

It also doesn’t take a lot of analytical energy to figure out why this is important in the lives of everyday Americans. If the president of the United States is on the take through under-the-table payments coming from China, is he really going to negotiate the best possible trade deal? Is he going to protect our manufacturing base in the Midwest from being undercut by cheap Chinese imports? Is he going to stop the fentanyl that the Chinese Communist Party is pouring into our country?

Let’s break it down to the smallest possible level—maybe if we have a vibrant manufacturing base and had the Chinese drug trade at bay, George Floyd wouldn’t have been lonely and sad, walking the streets with counterfeit bills, his system pumped full of fentanyl and vulnerable to a cop who was full of himself. Maybe Floyd would have been gainfully employed and happy.

That was the kind of question that Joe Biden should have been forced to answer. It should have been something Chris Wallace initiated at the debate. At the very least, when the President of the United States forces the issues and is more than willing to ask all the questions himself, Wallace could have let it go through.

But no. At this crucial moment of a presidential debate—a moment that 1 of 6 Biden voters later told pollsters would have changed their vote had they had been allowed to hear it, Wallace summoned all the credibility he’d built up over decades in journalism and placed it firmly at the service of the Chinese Communist Party. Wallace shut the conversation down.

Now we come to Election Night. Six different states took the unprecedented step of shutting down their counts for the night. Donald Trump led Joe Biden—by a lot—in five of those states, and trailed him by a little in one (Arizona) with a lot of Trump vote still to come in. Anyone’s journalistic spidey sense should have been going off. Clearly, something was up. Shutting down the vote counting just doesn’t happen.

What was Chris Wallace’s take? “Vote counters have to sleep too.” Oh. I guess they never had to sleep in any of the elections before this where they just counted until everything was done. And I guess the idea of using shifts was out of the question. The lack of even the minimum journalistic curiosity for why only battleground states where Trump had a  huge lead were subject to shutdown remains utterly stunning.

This one-time journalist wasn’t done. He joined the rest of the crew at Fox News in refusing to cover anything to do with the legitimate effort to contest the certified results of the election. Those of us who were doing so, worked through the proper channels—writing state legislatures and hoping then Vice-President Mike Pence would send the electors back to those state legislatures for further investigation.

All we wanted was a journalist to give us fair coverage—even to ask difficult questions. No political movement is perfect and I was anxious to see how our arguments might fare under the withering questioning of someone like Wallace, so long as we were given a fair chance to answer.

No dice. Wallace instead arrogantly cut off one of his guests in late November 2020 who referred to Biden, and said “It’s President-Elect Biden.” Oh. So much for journalism.

Now we come to January 6. There is considerable evidence that FBI agents were working undercover, trying to stir up Trump supporters to go into the Capitol. There is video circulating of an agent (identified through his connection to previous sting operations) almost desperately trying to get people in MAGA hits to go into the Capitol with him.

In fact there’s 14,000 hours of video of that afternoon that the FBI is sitting on. In light of the fact that we now know that the FBI was complicit in the Russia Collusion Scam—something Wallace and everyone else at Fox News gladly gave wall-to-wall coverage to, the notion that this institution would try something on January 6 to smear Trump and his voters is hardly far-fetched.

A journalist would try investigating it. But Chris Wallace has not. The only one at Fox News that has is Tucker Carlson. And supposedly, Carlson’s efforts are the reason Wallace is leaving.

I don’t know if this is true, but two other Fox contributors—Jonah Goldberg and Steven Hayes, have already left, citing their anger at Carlson’s efforts. It takes a pretty petty person to leave simply because one person at the highest-rated political network in the country is allowed to pursue something you wouldn’t. But small-minded is what they are.

I hope Chris Wallace is not that small-minded. But we do know this—he’s no longer a journalist. A real journalist would have explored the sources of the Biden Family Corruption and maybe even further found out how many Republican officeholders are guilty of the same sort of thing. A real journalist would have covered the investigation into the Election Fraud. And a real journalist would at least be asking why FBI agents were asking Trump supporters to go into the Capital on January 6.

I haven’t followed Chris Wallace’s entire career. I’d like to think that at some point, as a young reporter, maybe he was a real journalist. The late Bob Novak, one of the great journalists in the history of the nation’s capital wrote a memoir called The Prince of Darkness and recalled how it was a young Wallace who beat them all to the story that Ronald Reagan was about to pick George H.W. Bush as his running mate at the 1980 Republican Convention (conventional wisdom said Gerald Ford was going to be the pick).

But whatever Wallace was in his younger days, his career today is a grave discredit to his chosen profession.

In the classic book and film The Godfather, there’s a character named Salvatore Tessio. Godfather junkies know the story, so I’ll keep it brief. But for years, Tessio was The Godfather’s most loyal lieutenant, absolutely trusted in the most delicate of situations. After The Godfather died and his son took over, Tessio bet that the Family’s fortunes were on the decline and cut a treasonous deal with another Family. He was found out and one of the final scenes of the movie is him being led off to what is presumably his execution.

The movie shows a key character, Tom Hagen, looking out the window in sadness. The book describes Hagen as filled with sadness that such a brilliant man “made such a fatal mistake so late in life.”

Today, Chris Wallace is Tessio. It didn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t like I was asking him to become a hard-core Trump supporter. In fact, I’d have preferred he not. I would have preferred he just be a journalist. But like so many in our nation’s corrupt capital, he got soft. And that’s why he has to go.