CNN’s Chris Wallace on Why He Left Fox News: I Have A Problem With ‘Conspiracy and Lies’

Chris Wallace , who’s been an anchor and political reporter for half a century, believes the news business has changed drastically since his career began. In those years, he’s held coveted positions at most of the major networks – ABC, NBC, and of course, Fox News. In 2021, after nearly two decades as the anchor of Fox News Sunday , he quit the network for a job at its rival CNN.

On Mediaite’s Press Club , Wallace spoke at length about the circumstances that lead to his departure from the network. “I had no problem with conservative opinion any more than I do with liberal opinion,” he told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin . “But what I do have a problem with is conspiracy and lies. The truth is non-negotiable.”

Wallace recalled how the network promoted Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election, claims which led to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and Fox’s eventual $787.5 million settlement with Dominion, a voting tech company subjected to those conspiracy theories. “I’m glad to see that somebody is paying for playing with the truth,” Wallace said of the settlement.

Wallace, now the host of two shows at CNN, is out with a new book Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days that Changed America’s Politics Forever . It tells the story of the race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon – how despite legitimate claims of voter fraud and a wildly tight race, Nixon decided not to contest his loss. “So Trump has done things no other politician has done. He’s contested an election,” Wallace explained. “Here’s an election that may really have been stolen, and the loser says, I am not going to contest because it would be a bad thing for America.”

Wallace also spoke about his career, the future of CNN, and his thoughts on the presidential debates this election season – as someone who has moderated two in his career.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube , Apple Podcasts , or Spotify . Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: Chris Wallace is the host of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace on CNN and Max. He’s also the host of The Chris Wallace Show , which airs Saturdays on CNN. It’s never really enough Chris Wallace though, is it? So we have him here in studio at Mediaite. He’s out with a new book, Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days That Changed America’s Politics Forever , which is right behind me. Chris Wallace, thanks for coming on Press Club .

Chris Wallace: Thank you, Aidan. I’m delighted to be here.

When you joined CNN, to host Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace , you said at the time that you were excited to be covering new topics that weren’t just politics because you had hosted Fox News Sunday for nearly two decades, and you’ve covered politics for your entire career. Now you’re hosting hosting The Chris Wallace Show on CNN that dives headfirst into the big political issues of the day. So you were unsuccessful.

It’s like The Godfather III , when Al Pacino says, “Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in.”

Are you happy to be doing politics again?

Here’s the genesis of doing a political show again. David Zaslav, you’ve heard of him, called me up and he said, I think I want you back doing some politics. And I said, okay. And that’s why David Zaslav and I get along just fine. He asks me to do things and I say yes. But I will say that as we got into the presidential election year and we started really just a year ago, we started in November of 2023, I think I would have felt a little adrift if I weren’t involved in covering politics. I really enjoy the way I’m doing it, after 18 years on Fox News Sunday, I never wanted to have to book another politician again. It’s just so hard, so demanding, so competitive. I think we did well, but I had done it. And it’s easier to book a panel.

And when I came up with my idea, basically Zaslav said, I want your voice on CNN doing politics. That was really the marching orders. I came up with the idea. I said ‘The McLaughlin Group’ meets ‘Pardon the Interruption’. And for those who aren’t old enough, John McLaughlin used to do a really can’t-miss political show with four panelists. They were probably three conservatives and one liberal or moderate, we’re more fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, two liberals, two conservatives. And we chew over not only politics because, yes, we’re interested in that and we certainly are staying very abreast of what’s going on in the presidential race. But we talk about other events, foreign affairs, current events, and we’ll also do some social stuff. We have a section called “Yay or Nay”, where we’ll talk about some trend or some oddity and delve into that. We have Kara Swisher, so we talk a lot about the internet and AI and the latest in Silicon Valley. So I like the breadth of it. But yes, our lead is politics.

During your career, you were known as a tough and authoritative interrogator of politicians. Was that something that you missed as well, the brawling of it all?

Not especially.

You felt like you did that enough.

I mean, are there some people that are out there right now, and they know who they are, that I would love to get a crack at for half an hour? Sure. But I’m just fine. And the other thing is our special events, the Biden Trump debate, I was part of our coverage that night, the Trump Harris debate, I was part of our coverage that night, I was at both conventions, I’ll be part of election night. So at this stage of my life and career, I’m getting just enough.

You mentioned the booking being a pain. Is it the booking and also having guests on the show, particularly in the Trump era, that might be a little more slippery, a little bit more difficult to handle in terms of getting to the truth of something?

Oh, that’s right up my alley. I love people who are trimming and trying to hold them to account. That sparring, that preparation is very enjoyable to me. It was really the booking. Think about it this way. If you’re trying to have a dinner party on Saturday night, and four other people in your neighborhood want to have a dinner party on Saturday night, and you’re all trying to book the most interesting people or invite the most interesting people to your dinner party. You’re all going to say, well, Joe is terrific and he’s just done something very interesting. Well everybody else knows that Joe’s interesting and is trying to book him too or invite him to the dinner party. So it just was tough. And then you get into the thing where, now back to politics, if they’re Republicans, they’re more likely, when I was at Fox, to go on Fox, if they’re Democrats, with a few very notable exceptions, a lot of them wouldn’t touch Fox with a ten-foot pole. So it just made it hard. But are there people out there that are running right now that I think, I would love a crack at them, and occasionally see them interviewed and think, I could do it better? Yeah.

Who?

I always enjoyed interviewing Trump, although I will say, I always found Trump very easy to interview.

Really? People have trouble with him.

I never did. For folks out there, check out my interview with him in July of 2020 on the veranda outside the Oval Office. I skewered him. The reason I find Trump easy is because he uses the same lines. One of the things you do, when you’re doing an interview, is you say to yourself, all right, if I ask this, sometimes I’ll do it just in my own head, sometimes I do it with a staffer, what’s he or she going to say back? And then what’s my response to that? With Trump, when I asked that first question, I always knew what he was going to say back because he had said it before. So you could sit there and really prepare for the comeback, which I always felt the follow-up question was your meat and potatoes. That’s where you could score some points.

So when he insists that he won the 2020 election. If you ask him that question, you know what he’s going to say in response and you can bring whatever evidence you have to bear.

You’d have to, because that’s been so litigated. In 2020, one of the things was Covid, so he was talking about the fact that it was burning embers at this particular point. So I literally had a chart made. That to me was always a lot of the fun, prepping for it beforehand. I had a chart made which showed the graph of Covid cases in America. This is July of 2020. So we’re in the first months. It had gone up, then it had gone down and then it spiked again in the summer. And I remember saying to him, those aren’t burning embers. That’s a forest fire. And then, of course, he’d get into the nonsense about that’s because we test too much. And I said, really? So that’s the issue? The only reason we have Covid expanding is because we’re testing more? And would it be better if we didn’t test? You can tell how much I enjoyed it, it’s a good interview. I hope people will watch it. I remember him talking about the fact that he had aced this cognitive test, the Montreal Cognitive Test. So I went online and I took the cognitive test. And when I asked him about it and remember, he was talking about Biden back in 2020 being out of it, and I said, Mr. President, with all due respect, it’s not so hard. They have a picture of an animal and you have to identify it as an elephant. And he got annoyed at that and said, yeah, but those last 2 or 3 questions are really, really hard. And I went, no, they’re not.

Political news has changed enormously since you first started as a reporter.

The world has changed since I started. I’ve been doing this for half a century.

You’ve long lamented the preponderance of opinion in news, in cable news in particular. Do you think there’s still a market for straight news in America?

Yeah, I do. I’m still here and that’s my brand. I’m doing fine. I will say it’s one of the most profoundly depressing things to me. I can’t tell you, Aidan, how often I get stopped and somebody is like, I really like the way you report and I really like that you’re straight, you’re even-handed. I don’t know what side you’re on. And I like getting praised as much as anybody does. But the fact of the matter is, when I started at the Boston Globe in 1969 as a city hall reporter, balance, fairness were like accuracy. It wasn’t something that you were praised for, it was something that kept you from getting fired. And the idea that today, one, that I stand out, and two, that it’s an object of praise because it’s not more common in the television news marketplace, to me is a profoundly depressing statement about the state of news coverage today.

It’s an audience problem, too. I don’t think we can just blame media organizations.

No, it’s a business and they’re going where the viewers are going.

Every time you ask someone what they want, they always say, we want straight, unbiased news. But you look at the ratings and very often it’s partisan opinion that rates. There are exceptions here and there. But do you see it as an audience problem as much as a news problem?

Yeah. I feel like we, and I mean the media writ large, may have created the problem because we anticipated a market and we went for it. And when people saw, well, gee, it’s like choose your own adventure. If I’m a liberal, I can get the news that agrees with me, or if I’m a conservative, I can get the news that backs up my opinions. That was irresistible.

What do you make of the future of CNN, as envisioned by Mark Thompson, the new CEO. Does it feel like the kind of place where the kind of reporting you want to do will work?

In terms of straight news, are there things I see on CNN where I sometimes might not be totally comfortable? Yes. But certainly of the three major cable news networks, Fox on the right, MSNBC on the left, CNN is somewhere in the center and very happily so. Look, is it as successful in the ratings right now? Most of the time, no. But we do just fine. We make a lot of money. And I don’t know, do you have to be number one? And would you sell your soul to be number one? No.

CNN still makes a lot of money despite the ratings.

Yes. And the conversations that I’ve had with Mark or memos he sends out to the staff, it’s more about platforms than it is about direction. And I think he’s comfortable. Most of the news coverage that I see on CNN, I am terrifically proud of. It’s interesting, I’ve worked at a lot of places in my 50 years. I’ve worked at newspapers. I’ve worked at all the major networks except CBS for an obvious reason. There’s no question in my mind CNN is the greatest news organization I’ve ever worked at. I’ve never worked at the Times. I’ve never worked at the BBC. But there’s nothing in television news in this country that compares as a news organization to CNN. When the Russians invade Ukraine, or the Iranians attack Israel, our ability to flex our muscles and be in a variety of places all over the field of battle is unparalleled in television news in this country. And I’m enormously proud of that, enormously proud to be in a new organization that, here’s just one example, but there are so many, that employs somebody like Clarissa Ward. She’s one of my heroes.

She’s brilliant.

She’s brilliant and she’s fearless. Brilliant, frankly, is less impressive than fearless. I think, I wouldn’t want to go there, but she does.

You joined CNN in 2022 after leaving Fox. You later told The New York Times that your job at Fox became unsustainable. You pointed to coverage of 2020 election claims and January 6th, in particular, Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy theories about that day as an example of something that you couldn’t tolerate. How did you get to that point of feeling like it was unsustainable and then leaving Fox?

I don’t want to talk about this at great length, but briefly. I never had a problem with conservative opinion. And frankly, I thought, during the Roger Ailes days, that Fox was pretty good at having a firewall. I thought it was interesting that Fox would keep somebody like Brit Hume as the anchor on election nights. And if O’Reilly or Sean Hannity ever got on, they got on purely as an opinion commentator. Frankly, as opposed to some of the other networks, I think of MSNBC with Rachel and Chris Matthews, who at that time were doing it, I thought were much more opinion, much less straight reporters. And they were anchoring election nights and conventions and things like that. So I thought it was a firewall. I thought the firewall crumbled, particularly after the 2020 election. I thought that Fox changed after, I can point to one specific thing, the call of Arizona on election night in 2020, and the backlash from the viewers, and the desertion to places like Newsmax. Fox changed after that.

And we know through the Dominion defamation lawsuit that at the time, there was a lot of fear among executives that viewers were fleeing to places like Newsmax, and that drove a lot of the coverage to promote Trump’s false claims about the election. I should note that you and a number of your other colleagues at Fox on the news side pushed back aggressively, authoritatively, and consistently.

And unsuccessfully.

What did you make about the way that those claims were covered elsewhere? Did it bother you a great deal that they were being promoted by other people, not just at Fox, but in conservative media?

Look, we’re not perfect, the straight news reporters. For instance, the right-wing was talking about the Hunter laptop and a lot of people dismissed it, and it turned out that was wrong. It turned out that the Hunter laptop was legitimate, that a lot of the stuff that people were reporting was on it, in fact, was on it. And we missed a story there. So I’m not saying that the straight news people are always right. But there was a lot of stuff that was just nonsense. I would have been, delighted is probably the wrong word, but I would have been hungry if there had been stories of election interference. That would have been something that, like a ravenous wolf, I would have sat there and chewed over. It just wasn’t true. There were 60 cases, and the only one that Trump or Trump’s forces won was on one technicality. The Supreme Court was throwing it out, federal courts, state courts, judges appointed by Trump, they were all throwing it out. There was just no there there.

And also January 6th. I’ve been in Washington since 1978, 56 years. And my first job in Washington was covering the House of Representatives. So I have a real feeling for the Capitol, and to see the Capitol of the United States being overrun and Capitol Police being embattled and as it turned out, being very badly hurt, and the members of the House and the Senate fleeing for their lives, that hit me in a very deep place. And for people to say, well, they were just a bunch of tourists or that was a peaceful protest with a few malcontents, that was nonsense. That was an attack, an assault on American democracy. And I just didn’t have any patience for that.

When you go back and look at Fox opinion coverage on the night of January 6th, it was all very real. It was responding to a horrifying attack. Everyone was outraged about it. And then for some reason in the next couple of weeks, people like Tucker Carlson started downplaying it. And despite the fact that news reporters have been saying for years that, one, the election was not stolen and that, two, January 6th was an attack, a majority of Republicans now believe that the election was stolen and a lot of them would downplay January 6th. Do you have a sense of how that happened, how we went from recognizing that these things were nonsense to now it being almost mainstream, commonly accepted opinion on the right?

Among a certain set, yeah. I saw a poll, I don’t know how recent it is or how representative, but certainly within the last year, I saw a poll that said that 70% of Republicans did not think that Joe Biden is the legitimate president. That’s horrifying. When you talk about well, why did you leave and why was it unsustainable? I had no problem with conservative opinion any more than I do with liberal opinion. But what I do have a problem with is conspiracy lies. The truth is non-negotiable. It’s not something that you can sit there and shade or in any way play with. And I saw way too much of that happening.

If you’ve got somebody as dominant in the public discourse as Donald Trump feeding a story, and then you have that being amplified on a variety of cable networks and internet platforms, people are going to believe it. And in addition, it plays to what they want the truth to be. This is where we get back to the danger of choose your own adventure, where people are watching outlets or reading news sources that are feeding their misconceptions. Does it still surprise and shock me? Yes. But I can kind of understand it.

Fortunately, there are consequences for this kind of stuff. Fox obviously had to settle with Dominion for $787 million. Did you feel, I don’t want to say vindicated when you saw that, but did it make you feel like you had made the right decision leaving Fox?

I viewed it as I’m glad to see that somebody is paying for playing with the truth. And for very much breaking what I think is our almost sacred charter, which is to inform people, not to misinform people. To the degree that Fox was scared by the cost of calling Arizona correctly and people going to other more conservative outlets, there’s also a cost to lying and to misrepresenting. And I was happy to see that cost was being exacted.

Looking forward to 2024, are you concerned that Trump is going to again try to claim the election was stolen should he lose?

Sure.

Is that something that you are thinking about how to cover?

I’m certainly concerned about the possibility of that happening. One could argue the fact that 70% of Republicans in polls, a couple of years after the fact, thought that Biden still was not the legitimate president is a failure for objective news. We can’t make people have an opinion they don’t want to have. All you can do in the end, I think you just have to be out there, and tell it straight and continue to tell it straight. And confront people. But there’s no guarantee that you’re going to persuade them.

Do you feel like the news business is losing its grasp a bit on its ability to convince people of things like that? There is so much media now, so much of it is decentralized, you really choose your own adventure at this point. Do you feel like the big media news networks are losing their grasp?

I wouldn’t use the phrase lose their grasp because that sounds like they don’t quite know what their mission is. They certainly have lost their sphere of influence to the degree that they had it. When there were three television networks, there were three television networks. And there was no cable and there was no internet. It was a different time. But I think they still see their mission clearly. They obviously don’t have as much influence because the audience has gotten so factionalized. And you can see that the ratings have gone down dramatically for mainstream media, for most of the cable news networks. And people tune stuff out they don’t want to hear, and they tune stuff in that they want to hear. And that’s sad. But I don’t there’s a limit to what we can do. I don’t think they’ve lost the sense of the mission, I think they’ve lost their ability to inform people, just because a lot of people aren’t listening to them.

Speaking of independent media, there was a great piece by John McCormack in The Dispatch, and it asked the question, what happened to Tucker Carlson? You worked with him at Fox. Were you ever close with each other? And what is your view on how he went from, at the beginning of his career, being this pretty brilliant magazine writer, to serving as a host at Fox, to being on the same stage as Alex Jones and touring a Russian supermarket and marveling at the price of eggs?

I think it’s amazing what people will do to find an audience. And I think it’s sad that you try to be reasonably straight, and you don’t succeed at that, and fame, attention, notoriety, whatever it is, some people, unfortunately, are willing to do a lot. And at a certain point, it really becomes, because this isn’t some magical thing, you know, if you’re at all intelligent and an observer of the business, you know ways to feed people’s interest, attract eyeballs, clicks, click-bait, all of that stuff, it ultimately becomes a character test of what are you willing to do, and what are you in this business to do and to be? And to me, it’s never been a question that I want to tell the truth. I want to inform people. I want them to know at the end of watching or reading something to be better informed, more accurately informed than they were before they spent some time with me. And there are other people, obviously, who are just trying to attract attention. There’s a lot of ways to attract attention. I mean, fire engines, nude photographs, there’s all kinds of stuff. You have to decide what your standards are.

This show airs on YouTube, and I once heard somebody describe being independent on YouTube as the equivalent of busking on the internet, which I thought was a really good way to put it, because you have to constantly be attracting an audience, which is not a pressure that is so apparent if you’re on one of the news networks. Do you feel like having the perch of being on a news network frees you up to do more? You’re less audience-captured than you would be if you were independent. Do you think that that’s a risk of going independent?

I haven’t thought about this a lot because I’ve always had this perch.

Would you ever consider going independent and busking?

I don’t know. I think at this point in the lifespan of our medium, you have to think about everything. When you’ve got somebody like Mark Thompson, who is a very distinguished journalist, was the head of the BBC, was knighted, the head of The New York Times, and he’s now saying, yes, we want to get the linear business going, that’s very important, it makes a lot of money, but our future is in really building a whole new audience in a whole new platform, you’d be stupid to not think about it. I think one of the things that I pride myself on as a political reporter is being able to see around the corner, being able to see things a little bit sooner than a lot of other people see them. And so, sure, if you didn’t think about streaming, if you didn’t see Brian Williams going on Amazon for election night and think, gee, that’s kind of interesting, what could that conceivably mean for me, I wouldn’t be as good at my job as I think I am.

Let’s talk about the book. Countdown 1960 . It’s the third book in the Countdown series. I should say first, like any good book on political history, there are a lot of parallels between this story and present day. 1960 was the first time that we had a televised presidential debate, which is fascinating because debates have been a big part of this cycle. There were also claims of a stolen election in 1960. What made you want to tell this story this time?

There’s also pressure on the “loser” to contest the election. There are two things, really. First of all, it’s a great story. You’ve got these two great characters who were enormously consequential in the history of American politics in the 20th century. John F. Kennedy, scion of this very rich family. I think you could say he ran the first truly modern campaign. He had his own pollster. He had his own private plane, the Caroline. He used television in more effective ways than it had been used up to that point. Richard Nixon, maybe the most influential or significant American politician of the second half of the 20th century, fighting these demons, had risen to power by being a slash-and-burner, known as Tricky Dick, trying to run as a statesman in this election, he’d been vice president for eight years. So it’s a great story with all kinds of wonderful set pieces, how John Kennedy hates Lyndon Johnson, the last thing he wants is to have him as his running mate, and he ends up on a ticket with LBJ. The first debate, and how incredibly differently Nixon and Kennedy prepared for it, how successfully Kennedy did, how unsuccessfully Nixon did.

This razor-tight election, you talk about the 2020 election, this election was decided by .17 of a percent, less than two-tenths of 1%, 100,000 votes out of millions cast, very credible allegations of vote fraud. And Nixon was under real pressure to contest the election. And he sits there and decides, look, we’re in the middle of the Cold War. We’re not going to go into a courtroom and have the leader of the free world up in the air for months. And I think he thought it had been stolen from him, but he decided to do the right thing and honor the peaceful transfer of power. So one, it’s a great story, but two, it has such relevance and resonance to 2020 and to the discussion today, when there was no evidence of a stolen election, and yet Donald Trump for the last four years has perpetuated this myth, a very damaging myth, that the election was stolen and that he was unfairly forced out of office. So it takes almost everything that we know from this current election in 2020, and now the campaign in 2024, and sets it on its head. It’s an election that may really have been stolen, and the loser says, I am not going to contest the election because it would be a bad thing for America.

It’s odd to hear Richard Nixon behaving more honorably than our politicians today.

He’s, in a way, the hero of the story. And I’ve thought about this a lot, I wonder if the Richard Nixon that we knew in 1968 to ’74, of Watergate and infamy, would ever have happened if he had won that election fairly, or if Kennedy had won it fairly. Because I think a lot of the bitterness, a lot of the resentment, and a lot of the feeling that it doesn’t matter how you do it, you just win, because I think he thought that’s what Kennedy had done in 1960. I think that really carried over into the bitterness and his sense that all guardrails are off, we’ll do what we have to do to win in 1972.

What was the most interesting thing that you learned about this debate between Kennedy and Nixon?

How utterly badly and improperly Nixon prepared for the debate. The interesting thing is, there was a stature gap, Nixon had been vice president for eight years, he had debated, not in a literal debate, but gotten in an argument on camera with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, in a model kitchen in an American exhibit in Moscow in 1959, he’d been all over the world, so he had a big advantage just in terms of his stature versus Kennedy, who was 42, who wasn’t nearly as well-known, seemed sort of callow and a rich kid. And so Nixon was hungry for this debate.

But where Kennedy prepared in a variety of ways, both substantively and even physically, was in California, got a good tan, got rested, looked like $1 million when he appeared on the stage, Nixon had suffered from a very severe staph infection when he banged his knee on a limousine door in August, had been at Walter Reed Hospital for two weeks, and had lost 10 pounds, was gray. Kennedy comes in with a tan. They ask him, do you want makeup? He said, no, I’m fine. They asked Nixon, who was famous for having a 5 o’clock shadow and had circles under his eyes. And he thinks I can’t get makeup if Kennedy didn’t get makeup. And he looked like hell. There’s a famous story, that I didn’t know, in the book that in the middle of the debate, Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago who helped Kennedy win the election, says, my God, they embalmed him before he died. Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, says at the end of the debate, he’s watching it in a hotel room with the reporters, he says, that son of a bitch just lost the election. It was a disaster. And Nixon realized the day after it was a disaster.

We watch these debates now, but remember, this is uncharted territory, there had never been a presidential debate on television. And one guy got it right and one guy got it wrong, and it probably swung the election.

You’ve hosted two presidential debates.

I have.

Before the debate that you hosted in 2016, between Clinton and Trump, you said, “it’s not my job to fact-check candidates, that’s the job of the opposing candidate.” That is the approach, to much controversy, that the CBS moderators took this time around. And I think people get angrier now more than they used to when you say that you’re not going to aggressively fact-check Trump. Do you think that they did a good job?

The moment when they had been talking about Springfield, Ohio, and the question was whether the Haitian immigrants were there legally or illegally, and Margaret Brennan, whom I have great regard for, tried to fact-check Vance. And then Vance said, no, you’re wrong and wanted to argue with her about it, and they cut off the mics. I winced. I thought that was just terrible. And I must say, I took some heat when I said I wasn’t going to fact-check. This was 2016, it was eight years ago, but in terms of our feeling about lies and just shameless misrepresentations on the stage, this was before Trump had become president, yes, he was running, but he hadn’t become president, it feels like it was a much more innocent time than where we’ve gone in the last eight years. I think my saying at that time, I’m not going to fact-check stands up pretty well, because you look at what happened with ABC where they backtracked. You look at what happened with CBS. It’s a very slippery slope.

I guess I really still feel like the obligation is on the other candidate. And the difference is that the other candidate in 2016 was Hillary Clinton. And I, one, had no doubts that she would be able to figure out for herself what she wanted to contest. In the Trump-Biden debate in June, the problem was Biden was incapable of fact-checking, and that creates a different issue. But this is probably going to be controversial, what I’m going to say, I think that the moderator’s fact-checking sometimes feels to me like virtue signaling. It’s like, I’m going to puff myself up. What you’re going to fact-check, what you’re not going to fact-check, who you’re going to fact-check or not. There was one point in the ABC debate where Trump had said, well, I lost, and David Muir asked him about it, and Trump said, I was being sarcastic. And Muir then said, well, it didn’t seem to me you were sarcastic. Really? Now we’re going to fact-check on whether a guy was being sarcastic or serious. There was a point in the ABC debate when they were talking about babies being killed post-birth. And I forget whether it was Linsey or David, somebody said, there’s not a single state where that’s legal. I didn’t mind that. It’s like Potter Stewart, a Supreme Court justice, said about obscenity. I don’t know that I can define it, but I know it when I see it. There are times when I hear a fact-check and I think it’s useful. And there are times when it feels like the moderator is just trying to say, I know better, and I’m not going to go down that road or let you get away with that. But when it ends up with you cutting off somebody’s mic who’s just trying to answer. You decided to fact-check him, and then he’s going to sit there and argue with you, and you’re not going to let him do that.

When I did my first debate, I sat down with Jim Lehrer, who was the king of presidential debates. He did 12 of them. There was one election cycle because, at that point, the Commission on Presidential Debates didn’t dictate, which it did in our case, who the moderators were going to be. It still had to be negotiated with the campaigns. And the only one that the two campaigns could agree on was Jim Lehrer. So he ended up moderating all three presidential debates. And Lehrer said to me, we had lunch before I did my first debate in 2016, and he said, you got to understand, it’s not about you, it’s not about the moderator. And if at the end of the debate, people say, that was a great debate, was there even a moderator there, that’s a success. Like a prizefight, God, that was a great fight, did they even have a referee in the ring with them? So at any point where you become the story in a presidential debate or a vice presidential debate, I think you’ve failed.

I take it then, that you’re unswayed by this argument, which I think has become fashionable in media criticism, that Trump has changed the rules, and that he needs to be approached in a different way, not just in debates, but in everything else.

No. Well, I am somewhere in the middle. I feel strongly both ways. I do think that Trump has to be covered differently than other politicians because he’s done things no other politician has done. He’s contested an election. This is one of the points I make in the book, Countdown 1960, particularly at the end when I’m comparing what happened in 1960 to what happened in 2020. So much of what he did in contesting the transition of power had never happened before in our country. And he’s still leaving the door open to doing it again. And so I do think he has to be covered differently. I just think that you have to pick your spots, and you have to think, is this really something? Like in the ABC debate, when they set the record straight on something that I didn’t know. I mean, I suspected it, but allowing a baby to die, if they’re viable post-abortion, is not legal in any state in America. I think that was useful to the viewer. But I think there are times when, if Trump says, I won the election, I think fact-checking him at this point and saying, no, you didn’t win the election, particularly in a debate, is virtue signaling.

Chris Wallace, his book is Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days That Changed America’s Politics Forever . Thanks so much for coming on Press Club , I really appreciate it.

This was a pleasure.