Brit Hume was Excellent Again Yesterday, But Who is Chris Wallace?
By MassNews Staff
            It was 4-1 against Brit Hume again yesterday on Fox News Sunday as Hume easily showed that his knowledge and understanding of the issues is clearly superior to the four people who are stacked against him every week.
            However, mercifully for her, Nina Easton of the Boston Globe was not tapped to appear on the same program as Brit.
            There were just the regulars: ultraliberals Juan Williams and Mara Liasson from the state-managed National Public Radio and the neoconservative Bill Kristol with Chris Wallace as leader of the group.

            Who Is Chris Wallace?
            Chris Wallace arrived at Fox a few years ago in the fall of 2003, the son of Mike Wallace, the well known reporter for many years at “60 Minutes” on CBS.
            Chris has plenty of experience from the thirty years since his start in 1975 but no one has ever accused him of being a conservative, as far as we know. He is 58-years-old.
            As a network news anchor since 1975, he has held many prestigious positions, including that of NBC’s White House correspondent and as anchor of the network’s Sunday morning show, Meet the Press. He originally joined ABC News in 1989 and has received numerous journalism awards, including a du Pont-Columbia Silver Baton, three Emmy Awards, and two Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards. He also served as senior correspondent for PrimeTime Thursday, and was a frequent substitute host of Nightline.
            Chris had worked only for ABC News and NBC before joining Fox. Over the years, he has interviewed a range of public figures—from President Bill Clinton to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; from an interview and one-on-one game with Michael Jordan to a profile of Cal Ripken, then on the verge of breaking Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played.
            For his Internet webcast, Wallace interviewed former Mafia hit man Nicky “The Crow” Caramendi; the CIA’s “Master of Disguise”; and a $1,000-an-hour hooker who is part of the explosion of prostitution on the Internet. Other prominent figures that Wallace has profiled include Edith Cresson, then France’s first female prime minister; Senator Bill Bradley; movie stars Jodie Foster, Kim Basinger, and Morgan Freeman; golf legend Arnold Palmer; NBA bad boy Dennis Rodman; and NBA great Magic Johnson about his retirement from basketball after contracting HIV.
            He has also conducted a number of ground-breaking investigations at ABC News: the safe haven that alleged Nazi war criminals have found in Australia; the duPont Columbia Award-winning probe of the financial services arm of Ford Motor Company that allegedly engaged in predatory lending practices; investigations of waste and fraud in the Medicare, Food Stamp, and Federal Disability programs; wealthy American expatriates who gave up their citizenship to avoid paying U.S. taxes; problems with the sudden acceleration on Chrysler Jeep Cherokees; problems with the B2 Stealth bomber; and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing.
            Wallace’s hidden-camera investigations include corporate sponsored Congressional junkets, which led to a ban on such trips; gender bias; baggage theft by employees at U.S. airlines; auto repair fraud; and home appliance repair scams.
            As White House correspondent for NBC, Wallace had covered President Reagan’s trip to China in 1984 and four Reagan-Gorbachev summits.
            For Meet the Press, he conducted a one-hour interview with President Nixon and anchored on-the-scene broadcasts from the Moscow summit and the 1988 Republican and Democratic conventions.
            He was the anchor of the Sunday edition of NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 1984 and from 1986 until 1987. A one-hour documentary hosted by Wallace on then First Lady Mrs. Reagan, “Nancy Reagan: Portrait of the First Lady,” was broadcast on NBC in 1985.
            He co-anchored the Today show in 1982. In 1981, Mr. Wallace was named Washington correspondent for special segments reports on NBC Nightly News.
            Wallace covered the presidential campaigns in 1980, 1984, and 1988 and was a floor reporter for NBC News’ coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions in those years. In 1980, he was the first network correspondent to report Ronald Reagan’s choice of George Bush as his running mate. In 1978 and 1979 Wallace covered Congress.
            He joined NBC in 1975 as a reporter with WNBC-TV in New York City. The investigative unit he headed won a Peabody Award and a 1977 New York State Associated Press Broadcasters Award for best enterprise reporting. In 1980, he won an Emmy Award for the NBC News documentary, “The Migrant.”