On Monday afternoon — with clips of the confrontation having seemingly ricocheted to every far-flung corner of the Web and with everyone from official Obama bloggers to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews rushing to pat Mr. Wallace on the back — [The Observer] caught up with Mr. Wallace via phone. The longtime newsman said that in retrospect he had mixed feelings about making the remarks.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t have any second thoughts about the substance because I still believe what I said was right,” said Mr. Wallace. “But after the fact, you do think to yourself — on a professional level with colleagues I very much like and respect — should I have done that off camera?”<\/p>\n
“It’s a close call,” said Mr. Wallace. “I’m not sure I’d do it again.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Oh, Chris. You’d come so far in the minds of so many. Why discard your new-found credibility so carelessly?
\n
\nIt’s possible that, FNC being FNC, Wallace didn’t have much of a choice. He conceded on Kilmeade’s radio show that his bosses at the network were unhappy with Wallace’s constructive criticism.<\/p>\n
Mr. Wallace later told The Observer that in fact he had received one e-mail from a Fox News executive (he declined to name names). “It was not at all in the sense of, you know, how dare you defend Obama,” said Mr. Wallace. “It was in the sense that, isn’t this the kind of thing we should be talking about off camera, not on camera?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Wallace apparently told his boss that he wouldn’t “make a habit of it,” the executive moved on, and there probably won’t be anything else to it. That said, it’ll probably be quite a long time before any of the network’s on-air personalities second-guess Fox News’ Democrat bashing again.<\/p>\n
Am I curious though, about encouraging Wallace to express his concerns “off camera.” If I’m not mistaken, didn’t Kilmeade respond to Wallace’s criticism by saying, “I appreciate you respecting us enough to say it on camera as opposed to writing an email”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was probably the most-watched segment Fox News has aired in months. Last Friday, “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Gretchen Carlson spent the better part of the morning demonizing Barack Obama over the “typical white person” flap, mainly by removing the quote from context. Enter “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}