Chris Wallace‘s new daily interview program for CNN+, Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, debuts tomorrow, and he granted the New York Times an in-depth interview in advance, where he discussed his move from Fox to CNN in January, among other things.
“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox,” Wallace told NYT’s Michael Grynbaum.
Wallace added that he doesn’t necessarily have an issue with “conversative opinion or liberal opinion.” However, “when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”
Wallace also said it wasn’t until after former President Trump’s 2020 defeat that he felt a shift at the network. He said he could no longer do his job well and feel good about it—and that he spent “a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”
The veteran TV news journalist also confirmed past reporting that he was so alarmed by Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation documentary “Patriot Purge”—which falsely suggested the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was a “false flag” operation somehow intended to demonize conservatives—that he complained directly to his Fox News bosses.
Fox News declined to comment to the New York Times.
Wallace says his new CNN+ series was inspired by the work of interviewers like CNN icon Larry King and Charlie Rose, and that he hoped “to have the kind of intimate, thoughtful conversation where we forget we’re on camera in a studio.”
Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? debuts tomorrow Tuesday, March 29, at 6 p.m. ET and airs Mondays through Thursdays.