Wallace is obviously more comfortable living in a media culture that allows liberal conspiracies and biases but not conservative ones.
Wallace is obviously more comfortable living in a media culture that allows liberal conspiracies and biases but not conservative ones.
W hy did Chris Wallace leave Fox News and move to CNN+? “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” he told the New York Times, “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”
Indeed, one assumes that a significant percentage of the Fox News audience believes that there was something fishy about the 2020 presidential contest and that Democrats have overstated the importance of the January 6 riot. Just as it is almost surely the case that a large segment of those who tune into CNN — or MSNBC — believe, despite no evidence to substantiate such claims, that democracy was stolen by Russian gremlins in 2016 and minorities are being stopped from voting. As we’ve learned in recent years, some political conspiracy theories are acceptable in mainstream news while others are not.
Are the people who gave platforms to those who smeared Brett Kavanaugh as a rapist — a gang rapist, actually — like Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick truth tellers? Are the people who went after Nick Sandmann the truth-tellers? Is Wallace’s new colleague Rex Chapman a truth teller? Are former CIA head and frequent CNN guest John Brennan (who lied to the American people about spying on the Senate), former U.S. director of national intelligence and now CNN national-security analyst James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress about spying on the American people), and fired FBI deputy director and now CNN law-enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe (who lied to the FBI about illegal leaks) truth-tellers?
Only recently, CNN was handing the network over to the obsequious brother of a New York governor, and would-be presidential contender, whose deadly decisions cost thousands of lives. When this governor was accused of sexual misconduct, CNN’s host helped him mount a defense behind the scenes. The former head of the network might have known about all of it. Truth?
CNN has shown no more devotion to accuracy than any other cable network. Over the past seven years or so, the network has been one of the leading spreaders of misinformation. No, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen did not testify that Trump had advance knowledge of any meeting between the Russians and his campaign. James Comey would not dispute the president’s claim that the former FBI director told him three times that he was not under investigation. Donald Trump Jr. was not offered advance access to the hacked emails of the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Trump officials did not have ties to a Russian investment fund and a CIA asset was not extracted from Russia because Trump put him in danger.
None of these stories, and numerous others meant to undermine the public’s trust in elections, turned out to be “truth.” We must assume that it was a deliberate attempt to undermine trust in the election, not only because of the sheer number of blown scoops, but because no real explanation was ever offered for these “mistakes” — virtually all of them miraculously skewing in the same useful direction.
This was not mere bias. Those who regularly pass on concocted partisan attacks as legitimate news are not journalists. And most of those responsible for these stories are still at the network. Many have been promoted. Say what you like about Fox’s ideological disposition, and it’s obviously strongly conservative, during the eight years of the Obama presidency and first Biden term, Fox never comes anywhere close to CNN’s level of journalistic malpractice, which was far more corrosive to public trust than an openly contrarian pundit like Tucker Carlson entertaining conspiratorial ideas. CNN, more than Fox or MSNBC, functions under the pretense that its pundits are dispassionate journalists — apples and bananas and all that. Yet the idea that Don Lemon, Brianna Keilar, or Jim Acosta are less partisan than Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Jesse Watters is a fiction.
Wallace is obviously more comfortable living in a culture that allows liberal conspiracies and biases but not conservative ones. And that’s his choice, of course. Wallace is often one of the best straightforward political interviewers in the business. There’s no need for him to perpetuate the fantasy that the American Left is less prone to paranoia or that his new employer has more reverence for the truth.