Chris Wallace fled Fox to go to CNN last year, right as the shake-up at CNN began. It seemed he thought after all those years that Fox was somehow beneath him and now his talents were going to be truly honored by CNN. But to be frank, it appeared that he mentally fled to CNN long before he left Fox since he’d been acting like a proponent of their liberal mantra for years.
Fox viewers didn’t exactly miss him when he was gone. Indeed, they enjoyed when — after leaving Fox — Wallace seemed to get his just deserts when the reason he went — a promise from Jeff Zucker to do a weekday interview program on CNN+ — imploded. Zucker got booted and CNN+ predictably tanked, which left Wallace at sea and caused him to have meltdowns.
CNN’s new CEO Chris Licht decided to keep his show “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” but move it to Sunday on CNN and Fridays on HBO Max.
As I wrote after the premiere of the new show in September:
[T]he premiere of Wallace’s new show on Sunday was a bomb, with only 401,000 viewers in the time slot and only 43,000 in the critical 25-54 age demographic. By contrast, Trey Gowdy had more than three times that on Fox with his Sunday show, with 1.3 million, and 78 thousand in that key demo.
So how has his show done since? Has it recovered? No, it just had its worst ratings yet.
The show, “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?,” garnered 323,000 viewers and 38,000 in the key 25-54 demographic when it aired Sunday, according to Nielsen data. The show averaged 365,000 viewers and 48,000 in the 25-54 demo in the month of January.
In comparison, Fox News’ “Fox & Friends Sunday” raked in 1.544 million viewers and Mark Levin’s program on Fox News, “Life, Liberty and Levin,” garnered 1.129 million views.
On top of that, as we previously reported, the whole network’s ratings are in the basement across the board, with the lowest ratings in nine years.
CNN just notched its lowest ratings in nine years across all its day parts for the week of Jan. 16 through Jan. 22, 2023, according to Nielsen averaging just 444,000 viewers in primetime, 93,000 in the all-important age 25-54 news demographic and 417,000 in viewers and 80,000 in the demo for total day. It’s the first time since May 2014 that the network failed to reach 450,000 viewers.
Its “CNN This Morning Show” with Don Lemon just had its worst week since it started.
But it shouldn’t be surprising that Wallace’s show wouldn’t do well. Check out the kind of dreck that Wallace was pushing — sucking up to Rep. Nancy Pelosi and talking about a “Frozen” song with Idina Menzel.
How far Chris Wallace has fallen/The not so “new” CNN: Promo for his show tonight: “Is that part of your super power, just be tougher?” Nancy Pelosi: “Just get it done, baby!” To Idina Menzel: “I want to spend some time talking about Let It Go.” pic.twitter.com/WrhR5iYI0C
— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 (@BrentHBaker) January 22, 2023
Talk about covering timely and hard-hitting issues. It’s easy to see why his show is in the dumper. Perhaps it should be called, “Who Cares Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?”
Story cited here.
