“As a reporter,” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said of Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s bombshell testimony before the House impeachment inquiry on Wednesday afternoon, “it seems to me, we have to go to what the headline is today.” And that headline, Wallace explained, was that Sondland had directly implicated President Donald Trump in a quid pro quo in which an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and potentially U.S. military aid to Ukraine were conditioned on Zelensky’s public announcement of investigations intended to benefit Trump politically.
On the websites of many national news outlets, journalists had indeed determined that the headline coming out of the hearing was Sondland’s acknowledgement of the quid pro quo and his declaration that senior officials, including Trump, were engaged in its formulation.
But that sentiment was not universal. Shortly after Wallace’s remark, I checked FoxNews.com, the website associated with his own network. There, the top headline was “President Trump declares ‘it’s all over’ for impeachment inquiry after Sondland testimony.”