Chris Wallace Traces Today’s Polarized News To His Dad’s ’60 Minutes’ On Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’
deadline.comChris Wallace, the CNN Anchor and host of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? on HBO Max, had a startling confession during his segment on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
During a conversation between Maher and Wallace lamenting today’s conservative/liberal polarization of the news, Wallace traced the problem back to the golden days of three major channels and the world tuning in at 6:30 PM to hear about the world from Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley.
Those programs drew audiences of as much as 29 million, but they weren’t profit centers. But the men who ran the networks at the time saw news as a public service, and if it didn’t lose an enormous amount of money, they were fine with that.
But when Chris Wallace’s father, Mike Wallace, and his 60 Minutes team started in 1968, things shifted. That show began making money, “and suddenly, the executives in television said, ‘You can make money from this.'” That’s when they “started chasing an audience.” Maher was stunned. “Aren’t you a bigger fan of 60 Minutes than me?” Maher joked that perhaps the negative attitude stemmed from the show taking Chris’s father away from home too much.
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