During his wide-ranging conversation on Mediaite’s Press Club podcast, CNN’s Chris Wallace spoke with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin about one of his former colleagues, Tucker Carlson. As a stalwart of traditional media, Wallace had something to say about the role the press should play in conveying the truth versus “trying to attract attention.”
Carlson, who was fired by Fox News in 2023, now hosts a show on Twitter/X and has formed alliances with known far-right conspiracy theorists including Alex Jones. Wallace himself quit Fox News in 2021. He explained on Press Club that the lies and conspiracy theories that festered after Trump lost the 2020 election, including Carlson’s conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol, pushed him to exit the network. Since, Carlson has frequently attacked Wallace in interviews.
McLaughlin asked Wallace about the turn his former Fox colleague has taken:
McLaughlin: 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?
Wallace: 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.
Watch the full interview via Mediaite on YouTube.
