Back in December when longtime broadcast journalist Chris Wallace announced he was leaving Fox News and the coveted anchor perch he had held there for some 18 years, speculation ran high that the “new adventure” he hinted at heading off to involved a stint at CNN, which is Public Enemy Number One as far as Fox News viewers and a growing number of cable news watchers across the country are concerned.
Sure enough, not long after Wallace revealed his departure from Fox, a statement was issued noting he would soon be joining CNN+, the paid streaming version of CNN which is expected to debut before the end of March.
For most conservatives, it was no surprise that Wallace, a registered Democrat whose broadcasts tilted leftward during the Trump years, would jump ship to Fox News’ long-struggling rival network. Still, questions were raised as to the sensibility of such a move considering not just CNN’s plummeting ratings but also the various embarrassing scandals they were dealing with at the time of the announcement, the most notable among them being the firing of “Prime Time” host Chris Cuomo, ostensibly over his level of involvement advising his brother and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the sexual harassment scandals from early-mid 2021.
Fast forward a couple of months, and not only have CNN president Jeff Zucker and his lover/CNN executive VP Allison Gollust “resigned” over their previously undisclosed affair, but there are fresh accusations swirling that both Zucker and Gollust had far more of a hand than previously known in some of those cutesy segments between the Cuomo brothers at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve also recently learned that the real reason Chris Cuomo was ousted from the network likely had to do with a sexual assault allegation made against him the week he was booted out.
Understandably, all of this would make anyone who had committed to joining CNN+ nervous, but for Wallace, the anxiety over being associated with the network during an exceedingly tumultuous time has reportedly reached a fever pitch:
SOURCE: Chris Wallace is having "daily meltdowns" at @CNN / @CNNplus. / Remember, CNN+ was Zucker and girlfriend Allison Gollust's "baby" and without them, the service is very much in flux. Something Wallace is not pleased with. (more to come)
— Jon Nicosia (@NewsPolitics) February 16, 2022
SOURCE UPDATE: "He has threatened to quit 2x this week. And it's just Tuesday" https://t.co/4BU3tGl5y5
— Jon Nicosia (@NewsPolitics) February 23, 2022
My thought bubble on this is: What the hell did Wallace expect? Even absent the Cuomo/Zucker scandals, it wasn’t exactly a big secret how bad things were at CNN, not just from a ratings perspective but a coverage perspective. Between Brian Stelter, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon and others, they’ve been an embarrassment for years, so much so that even reliably left-wing news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have taken to criticizing some of the decision-making and reporting styles there.
The place has been a trainwreck going back to well before Donald Trump took office, and got much worse afterward, with CNN wanting to be viewed as the “go-to” network for Trump haters. That didn’t work out too well, obviously.
In announcing he was leaving Fox News for CNN, Chris Wallace was trying to make a statement of sorts. Unfortunately for him, the statement he made was not the one he intended.
Story cited here.
