To anyone who follows national news on network television, Chris Wallace has been a familiar face and voice for decades. The current host of “Fox News Sunday,” he has been reporting for that network since 2003 (earning an Emmy nomination this year), when he left ABC News after 14 years. There, he had served as senior correspondent for “Primetime Thursday” and as an occasional host on “Nightline.” Prior to that move, Wallace worked for 14 years at NBC News, variously as a political correspondent, Washington co-anchor and news reader for the “Today” show, White House correspondent during the Reagan administration, anchor for the Sunday edition of “NBC Nightly News,” and one-year moderator of “Meet the Press.”
On a day off from Fox, What’s Up? Media caught up with Wallace from his “second home” near Annapolis and discussed his contentment here as an escape from Washington; the perceived and, to him, the very real bias of most network-television news; his relationship with his father, Mike Wallace, the both revered and reviled late star of CBS’ “Sixty Minutes;” and the uncertain future of news reporting in general and the public consumption of it.
What made living in Annapolis attractive to you? My main residence is in Washington, but we have a second home here. It took me probably 20 years to discover what an absolutely right place Annapolis is. My father had had a second home in Martha’s Vineyard for years, and we visited him there every summer. Even after he passed away, we continued to rent a house for a month in the summer in Martha’s Vineyard. But we endured so many missed connections and delayed or canceled flights that I thought there’s got to be an easier way to do this.
Chris Wallace enjoys relaxing and reading outside at his waterfront Annapolis home.
Meanwhile, my wife, Lorraine, was looking at places in Annapolis, and it was like we pressed the easy button. I finish the Fox News show at 10:15 on Sunday mornings, and by 11 I’m at my place here overlooking the water. I can feel my blood pressure, anxiety, and stress level going down every mile I get farther from Washington and closer to Annapolis.
You’re one of the few—if not the only—television journalists to have worked for all four major networks, if you include your time with Walter Cronkite at CBS. What would you say are the differences among or between each of those networks? It’s a little hard to compare, because I was at such different stages of my life and my career when I was working for each of them. I never really worked for CBS News. I was a high school intern in 1964 at the [party] conventions.
Generally speaking, I think there is an unspoken, but nevertheless real, liberal bias in the mainstream media. I think at Fox News—and I distinguish between the news side and the opinion side of Fox—that there is an effort to tell the full story. I think that full story includes some other points of view that the mainstream media leave out.
Chris Wallace enjoys kayaking with his grandson in and around the waters of Annapolis.
By most accounts, you seem to be known as the voice of reason and the straight shooter of the Fox News team. What do you think of that assessment? When people stop me on the street, they say I’m one of the few straight shooters in journalism generally. I think people are tired of the liberal bias at some places and a conservative bias at other places, and they just want somebody to try to report the news straight, to be equally tough if they’re doing interviews of members from both parties.
When I was growing up, fairness was a basic requirement. You distinguished yourself by how well you wrote or reported—or interviewed. But fairness was something everybody assumed. They no longer assume it. Somebody who is seen as being fair, equally probing on both sides, stands out. And I like that people recognize I’m trying to do that. But it makes me sad that it somehow sets me apart from a lot of my colleagues in the journalism business.
Has network news become more show business than public service? I think that’s probably going too far. I believe my father played a role in that perception with “60 Minutes.” What people found out from the tremendous success of that program is that news could make money, if done properly. And I think my father would acknowledge that. But he would also say “60 Minutes” has generally done a pretty good job of reporting the news in a responsible, even-handed way. Previously, news was seen as a public service, something that networks did with no expectation that they were going to turn a profit on it. But I think it did open a box, and as a result some of what one sees on network or cable television is not as serious, as legitimate, or as useful as it used to be a quarter- or a half-century ago.
Many people seem to be sighing heavily lately because the political climate in Washington now is somehow different from the way it’s ever been. Would you say we’ve seen this before? The climate has been poisonous at other points in our history. Look back at the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, for example. Those were quite ugly times in Washington, too, when the country was really fractured. So, it’s been as bad if not worse. Watergate would be another example. I think what distinguishes the present is that the division is so personal—the demonization of both sides. And it doesn’t seem to be as much about big issues than it is about personalities.
The Republicans are bashing Nancy Pelosi and some of the democratic presidential candidates. The Democrats are bashing Donald Trump. The result is that almost nothing gets done. And that’s sad to me. Even in the ’60s, great legislation was passed—the Civil Rights Act or housing and voting-rights acts. Now—whether it’s immigration, the economy, entitlements, or the change in our economic base from manufacturing to much more service-oriented or high-tech industries—we don’t seem to be addressing the great problems of the nation.
Fewer and fewer of the young people in this country are reading a daily newspaper or watching news on television. How are you dealing with that apparent reality? I think a lot of people are still interested in the news. They just get it in more and different ways. That’s been true throughout my career, and I assume it will continue into the future. The individual audience for any newscast, or for a Sunday-morning talk show, might be smaller, but my guess is that the aggregate of people who follow the news in some way is fairly constant. You just have to adapt to it.
I can see somebody back in the 1400s cursing Gutenberg and “that damn printing press.” There have been changes throughout time. Whether it’s the transportation business or the news business, you can either adapt and embrace change, or you’re going to fall by the wayside.
What can be done about the plight of local newspapers—the one in Youngstown, Ohio, being one of the most recent to cease publication? Yes, the Vindicator. I started at the Boston Globe, my first job out of college, so I understand and embrace them, because they cover news that nobody else covers. One of the papers I am pleased about is the Capital Gazette here in Annapolis, which suffered that tragic attack in 2018 and yet put out a paper the next day. Particularly in a state capital, the idea of not having a local newspaper that is patrolling the beat, swinging a light stick, and keeping people honest is troubling. I don’t think people act better when nobody is watching them.
We’ve read that you weren’t particularly close to your father early in life, but you embraced him later. What impact did he have on you? As a teenager, we became much closer, particularly after my brother died. I would say it isn’t what most people think. Did he teach me how to do an interview or how to check my shoulders when I’m behind the anchor desk? The answer is, none of that. As the father of six children myself, I’ve come to feel that your kids pay more attention and learn much more from what you do, not what you say. That was certainly true with my father and me.
Chris Wallace with his father, Mike Wallace, star of 60 Minutes who passed away in 2012 at age 93.
What I really picked up from him came from observing him over decades—maintaining high standards, a tremendous work ethic, the value of preparation. As the anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” I can be sitting down with the secretary of state, or a foreign leader, somebody who obviously knows more about the subject than I do. One of the things I’ve learned is, if you really prepare and have a “big book of research”—which I read and digest and use every week—early on in an interview I can challenge somebody in a way that they realize they can’t just spin you. They can’t just use their talking points. They’re really going to have to engage with you. So, you’re much more likely to get a good, substantive, fresh interview. And that’s certainly something I picked up from my father—again, not from something he said, but just from watching him in action.
What do you think of the new documentary film, “Mike Wallace Is Here”? Well, it’s good. I had nothing to do with it, other than the fact that I lived it. I didn’t produce it, and I don’t have any financial interest in it. I think it gives a real insight into my father, into his personality, his strengths, his weaknesses, his vulnerabilities.
It does tend to portray him as totally focused on his job and the next interview, to the neglect of his family. I think that was true certainly earlier in his career, but later, he mellowed. And while he continued to travel the world doing news-breaking interviews, he took much more comfort and engaged much more with his family. I don’t think the movie reflects that. It kind of gives a sense of it at the end, when he retires, that it’s like “Death of a Salesman” and he doesn’t have anything left to focus on. By the end of his life, my father was very devoted and had good relationships with his children and his grandchildren and took great comfort in that. And we took great comfort in our relationship with him.
When the movie was coming out, I googled “Mike Wallace” and was kind of shocked and disheartened to see the first name that popped up was a wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins. So, my greatest hope for the documentary is it’ll introduce my dad to a whole generation of young people who really never got to watch him.
How would you like history to remember Chris Wallace? I remember my father used to struggle with that question, and I think he was a little taken aback at the thought that history was going to remember him at all. He came up with the phrase, “tough but fair.” In fact, that’s on his tombstone.
I don’t know that history is going to pay any attention [to me], but if it does, I hope it would say that I was a good husband and a good father, an even better grandfather—and not a bad reporter. How’s that?
