Fox anchor Chris Wallace leaving for new gig at CNN
WASHINGTON (ap) » Veteran Fox Chris Wallace has left Fox News after 18 years for CNN, dealing a significant blow to Fox’s news operation at a time that it has been overshadowed by the network’s opinion side.
Wallace delivered the surprising news that he was leaving at the end of the “Fox News Sunday” show he moderates, and within two hours CNN announced he was joining its new streaming service as an anchor. CNN+ is expected to debut in early 2022.
“It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this,” Wallace, who is 74, said on his show, which airs on the Fox network and is later rerun on Fox News Channel. “Eighteen years ago, the bosses here at Fox promised me they would never interfere with a guest I booked or a question I asked. And they kept that promise.”
Wallace was a veteran broadcast network newsman, working at both ABC and NBC News, before the late Roger Ailes lured him to Fox with the promise of his own Sunday show. Methodical and never showy — in contrast to his father Mike, the legendary “60 Minutes” reporter — Chris Wallace was known for his willingness to ask hard questions of all guests no matter their politics.
He was the first Fox News personality to moderate a presidential debate, doing it in 2016 and 2020. The debate he moderated last year went off the rails when thenpresident Donald Trump repeatedly interrupted Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
“He is the most tenacious interviewer in the television business, based on intense preparation and plain old persistence,” said Howard Kurtz, host of Fox’s “Media Buzz.”
Anne Rice, author of gothic novels, dead at the age of 80
Anne Rice, the gothic novelist widely known for her bestselling novel “Interview With the Vampire,” died late Saturday at the age of 80.
Rice died due to complications from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice announced on her Facebook page and his Twitter page.
“In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage,” Christopher Rice wrote in the statement.
Anne Rice was the author of the 1976 novel “Interview With the Vampire,” which was later adapted, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 movie directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
It’s also set to be adapted again in an upcoming TV series on AMC and AMC+ set to premiere next year.
“Interview With the Vampire,” in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice’s first novel but over the next five decades, she would write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies worldwide.
Thirteen of them were part of the “Vampire Chronicles” begun with her 1976 debut.
Born Howard Allen Frances O’brien in 1941, she was raised in New Orleans, where many of her novels were set.