The women of The View expressed concerns the departure of longtime Fox News anchor Chris Wallace would further radicalize the network.
When moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked her co-hosts to weigh in on the impact of Wallace's exit, they did... and even started to wonder what Fox News should be renamed after losing a veteran newsman who gave the outlet an air of legitimacy.
You can hear their discussion in the video below.
Joy Behar got the ball rolling with her remarks, opining that Wallace “almost” gave the channel “some legitimacy" during his 18-year tenure:
“You mean QAnon News? We can now call it Trump News. Just call it Trump News... when Chris Wallace was at Fox, he almost gave it some legitimacy, some cover... because he was there, you know?"
"And I think that does a disservice to, you know, other media news outlets that are legit."
Immediately afterward, guest host and CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter, who noted that she has been a "Never Trumper from the beginning," suggested that Wallace “was in a very difficult position at Fox" where he was "clearly uncomfortable" with the decision by the network's high-profile hosts to downplay the January 6 insurrection.
Carpenter added that Wallace's exit is an opportunity for "everyone in the media" to "seriously question who they choose to elevate to their platforms," stressing that Fox News's coverage, which consistently backed the "Big Lie" that the 2020 general election had been stolen, intentionally interfered with "the peaceful transfer of power."
At this point, co-host Sunny Hostin praised Wallace as a consummate newsman, calling him "talented" and "very measured." However, she acknowledged that these same traits likely meant that Wallace was not “well received by a lot of Fox News viewers.”
Noting that Fox News contributors Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg recently resigned from the network in protest over Tucker Carlson’s revisionist January 6 docuseries Patriot Purge, which falsely alleges that the attack was a "false flag" operation orchestrated by the federal government, she offered a name change of her own:
“So to your question, Whoopi, what does it become now? Is it the Tucker Carlson Fake News Network?”
Ultimately, Behar, who accused Fox Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who serves as its CEO, of "destroying America," concluded that the network would soon "find another person" to push lies in addition to biased and misleading coverage, saying:
“They will find another person who will fill in the spot who will take millions and millions of dollars and go against his own real-truth politics. You’ll see. People can be bought, left and right.”
Many have concurred with these assessments and have continued to criticize Fox News for its role in spreading the lies that culminated in the January 6 insurrection.
Wallace has long publicly contradicted the suggestion from former President Donald Trump that the electoral process in the United States is rife with fraud and abuse, including during a particularly infamous segment in 2016, when Trump cast doubt on the election he ultimately won.
During that interview, which aired just three weeks before former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost her election to Trump, Trump said that he would decline to commit to respecting the result of the election if he lost.
After Trump launched into an unrelated tangent about “media corruption,” Wallace successfully interjected, saying that "one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner,"
Earlier this year, Wallace pushed back against the suggestion from former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski that the media was at fault for not lending credence to Trump's conspiracy theories.
At the time, Wallace pointed out that Trump's allegations of election fraud "went to more than 60 different court cases and you were beaten in every one."
"The Supreme Court refused to even hear the Trump challenges, so please don't blame this on the media," Wallace said matter-of-factly. "You had your day in court and you lost."
