Former “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace has reportedly landed on his feet — and back in the anchor chair — after the network’s fledgling streaming service CNN+ failed to launch.
According to a report published Wednesday by Axios, Wallace is set to anchor a Sunday evening show on CNN. Two sources reportedly informed the outlet that Wallace, who was hosting an interview-based show four days a week prior to the rapid collapse of CNN+, will move back to a weekly show with the cable news giant. The report did not indicate what the format of Wallace’s new show would be.
Wallace initially left Fox in December, saying that he wanted to try something new after nearly two decades at that network.
“After 18 years, this is my final ‘Fox News Sunday,’” Wallace told his viewers on December 12. “It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this … There’s a lot you can do on Sunday mornings. The fact that you’ve chosen to spend this hour with us is something I cherish. But after 18 years, I have decided to leave FOX. I want to try something new, to go beyond politics, to all of the things I’m interested in.”
Wallace later claimed that he had ultimately decided to leave Fox after the fallout from the 202o election, telling the New York Times, “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable. I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”
“Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox,” Wallace continued. “And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”
Within days after announcing his exit from Fox, Wallace had confirmed he was going to CNN, inking a multimillion-dollar deal to create a new show for the streaming service that had not yet launched.
But massive personnel shake-ups at CNN — up to and including the sudden resignation of former network chief Jeff Zucker and his paramour Allison Gollust — left the network in disarray heading into both the CNN+ launch and a planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.