Fox News loses its last tiny sliver of credibility with Chris Wallace's departure

The New Republic

prominence has always been somewhat overstated," says Alex Shephard. "But in recent years, Wallace had increasingly become something of an anomaly at a network that’s shed itself of journalistic pretensions—and actual journalists—in making a turn toward demagoguery. (It’s notable that Fox spent a significant portion of the airtime leading up to Wallace’s departure covering the torching of its own Christmas tree by a troubled homeless man, as if it were an attack on the country.) It was, moreover, recently reported that Wallace—along with fellow anchor Bret Baier—had objected to Fox News’s decision to air a Tucker Carlson–made propagandistic “documentary” about the January 6 riot at the Capitol that claimed, among other things, the event was a false-flag operation staged by the FBI. Ultimately, his departure is the clearest sign yet that Fox News’s transformation away from hard news is finally complete: Fox News’s opinion side has swallowed its news division whole. Wallace, who has hosted several presidential debates, was invaluable for a network that has long used the fig leaf of respectability that its actual journalists provided as a way of laundering its real purpose: to aggressively push right-wing talking points and policies to its sizable audience. A sly and mischievous interviewer, Wallace was in some ways the perfect newsman for a network intent on insisting it still employed them: He relished setting traps and asking thorny questions to politicians from both parties. If you wanted an example of a journalist who both wouldn’t let up and treated representatives from both parties equally, you couldn’t do much better. And while the bar is set quite low where Sunday morning political shows are concerned, Wallace was, among his peers, perhaps the most pugilistic interviewer of the genre, someone who relished a fight and whose bullshit detector was particularly sharp. Naturally, while there’s little reason to doubt that Fox executives ever pressured Wallace about his coverage, the Fox News Sunday panels nevertheless often reflected the network’s overriding rightward tilt, both in terms of composition and content."