Newsmax has been taking lots of potshots at Fox News of late, and the departure of longtime host Chris Wallace from the channel was an occasion for more of them. The initial Dec. 12 article on Wallace’s departure was cobbled together from wire sources, but it appears Newsmax added a little right-wing grousing:
Wallace was the first Fox News personality to moderate a presidential debate, doing it in 2016 and 2020. The debate he moderated last year drew much scorn from conservatives as Wallace frequently cut off then-President Donald Trump as he interrupted Democratic challenger Joe Biden to contest a point.
Trump at one point objected to a Wallace question on healthcare policy, saying, “I guess I’m debating you not him (Biden). But that’s okay. I’m not surprised.”
After that, an article the same day by Eric Mack cranked up the hate for his failure to be a complete right-wing shill:
The hashtag #goodriddance was among the top trends Sunday on Twitter as anti-Trump host Chris Wallace announced he is leaving “Fox News Sunday” for CNN’s streaming service.
“He’ll be controlled by the radical left,” then-President Donald Trump said about the prospect of facing Wallace as moderator in the one and only 2020 presidential debate. “They control him.”
Former Trump adviser Steve Cortes tweeted his testy exchange with Wallace after that debate, where Wallace was blasted for “haranguing” Trump and “his incredibly biased performance as debate moderator.”
[…]Among those appearing in the Twitter stream hailing Wallace’s departure was Act for America founder Brigitte Gabriel, who tweeted: “Good riddance to Fake News Chris Wallace!”
Conservative podcast host Todd Starnes mocked Wallace being “thrilled” to join the “lowest-rated cable news network.”
Among Wallace’s many defenses of Biden was a false claim the candidate did not support a defunding of police, despite wide reporting to the contrary.
Mack didn’t mention that Cortes was a Newsmax TV host until he lost his job in a snit over corporate vaccine mandates.
Mack served up another sidebar about how Donald Trump “called his shot this past June on anti-Trump host Chris Wallace leaving Fox News,” complaining that “His ratings are terrible, he’s ‘almost’ radical left, he was acknowledged to have failed badly as a presidential debate moderator (except for Biden who he totally protected!), and so much else.”
Dick Morris cranked out a Dec. 13 column in which he too whined that Wallace didn’t give Trump a pass during that debate:
But the moderator was following the “Chris Wallace Rule,” ignore the facts in favor of a liberal bias.
And, when it came time to discuss the shenanigans that would later mar the 2020 vote counting, Wallace totally dismissed the looming danger of a disputed election.
The Fox News anchor blithely assured the national audience, “the biggest problem, in fact, over the years, with mail-in voting has not been fraud, historically. It has been that sizable number, sometimes hundreds of thousands of ballots, are thrown out because they have not been properly filled out or there is some other irregularity they just see through that deadline.”
And even before the debate, Wallace tried to dismiss the charge that Biden wanted to defund the police.
When Trump told Wallace in an interview that Biden “wants to defund the police,” Chris sprang to the vice president’s defense saying, “Sir, he does not.”
Wait a minute, is this guy a journalist or press spokesman for the Biden campaign?
Morris concluded:
This debate should be known throughout modern history as one in which a very biased journalist from Fox News delivered an election defeat to a sitting U.S. president.
Instead the left and the establishment will lionize Wallace for his bias, as we are seeing with his reward of a big, plum job at CNN.
Former President Nixon put it best when he said ‘history is written by liberals.”
It really is Chris.
Morris heartily embraced Trump’s bogus election conspiracies, so he would defend Trump against Wallace.