A few questions for Wallace

Chris Wallace, the anchor of "Fox News Sunday," appeared with his father, "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace, at Middlesex Community College in Lowell this week. We caught up with him by phone beforehand to talk about his father, his career, and the future of the news business.
JOANNA WEISS

Q How do these events with your father go?

A They call it "60 Minutes With the Wallaces." We spend 40 minutes interviewing each other. That's kind of interesting, when you're being interviewed by Mike Wallace. Since we know everything about each other, we have a sort of mutually assured destruction pact: I won't embarrass him; he won't embarrass me.

Q People must wonder why you went into journalism, since your father was so prominent in the field.

A When I went to Harvard, I was very serious about going to law school, and was about a week away from starting law school in 1969. But I was just so intrigued by the business. I'd been exposed to it growing up, and it seemed to me to be a great way to make a living. So I looked for a job in Boston. . . . I was fortunate enough to get a job as a starting reporter for the Globe.

Q What would you say to college students thinking about going into journalism today?

A The best answer to that is the fact that I've got four kids and none of them are going into journalism. Look, I love it -- I can't imagine my life any other way -- but when I started back in 1969 it was a completely different industry. I think the standards were higher -- we focused on real news and less on celebrity news and car chases and a bunch of the junk that passes for news these days. I'm very fortunate, as my father has been, that I've been able to stay in the high end of the business. But as a kid starting out, I don't think you would be assured of that.

Q How do you differentiate one Sunday talk show from the others?

A Roger Ailes , the head of Fox News, felt that you really couldn't be in the news business if you didn't have a Sunday morning talk show. You'd do the same basic format -- you'd get news makers and you'd have a panel -- but you would ask different questions, you would approach the news in a different way, you would hear from different voices. Just this week on Virginia Tech, everybody's saying, "Well, how about gun control?" But there is a body of opinion that feels that the real answer is you allow people with guns to carry them on campus. I'm not saying I necessarily subscribe to this opinion, but I think it's an opinion that millions of people hold, and we discussed that.

Q Senator Ted Kennedy refused to go on your show for a long time. Last winter he finally relented.

A That's always been one of my goals at Fox. . . . We try to reach out to Democrats. And I think they believe that they get a fair shake on " Fox News Sunday." In the last couple of years we've had Hillary Clinton, we had -- somewhat infamously -- Bill Clinton. Howard Dean says that I'm his favorite anchor on Fox News, John Kerry has been on, and finally we cracked the big nut and got Ted Kennedy to go on in December .

Q More recently, you made news when Fred Thompson announced, on your show, that he was considering a run for president. How did that come about?

A We'd been interested in Thompson, and people had been talking inside the Republican Party about their dissatisfaction with the current field. We kept asking, and he kept saying no, and then one week he said yes. And clearly it was because he wanted to say he was thinking about it.

Q In your career at Fox, do you want to do anything other than the morning show?

A Well, I do other things. . . . I'm involved in our political coverage. I will be one of the questioners in our South Carolina debate next month. One of the things that I enjoy most about an all-news network is that there are other opportunities. As a home base, to do a Sunday morning show is just the greatest opportunity I can imagine. I would be happy to do it for the rest of my career, which I hope is as long as my father's.

A Bahamian court cleared the way yesterday for Anna Nicole Smith's ex-boyfriend to leave with their baby daughter, rejecting an appeal by the mother of the former reality TV star. The judges ruled that a US court would likely have the final say in the custody dispute between Virgie Arthur and Larry Birkhead (inset), who was confirmed as the 7-month-old baby's father after DNA testing. Arthur was challenging a judge's decision this week to let Birkhead leave the island chain with Dannielynn. (AP)

Richard Gere tried to quell the storm over a public kiss he gave a Bollywood star at an AIDS awareness event in India, apologizing yesterday for any offense. Gere's embrace and kiss of actress Shilpa Shetty (inset, with Gere) sparked several noisy demonstrations by hardline Hindu groups and a flurry of legal complaints, which ended with a judge in the northwestern city of Jaipur issuing an arrest warrant for the two stars for violating obscenity laws. "What is most important to me is that my intentions as an HIV/AIDS advocate be made clear, and that my friends in India understand that it has never been, nor could it ever be, my intention to offend you," Gere said in statement issued by the Heroes Project, an organization the 57-year-old actor co-founded to combat AIDS in India. (AP)

Hugh Grant accepted undisclosed damages yesterday from a British newspaper publisher over claims about his relationships with former girlfriends Jemima Khan and Elizabeth Hurley. The 46-year-old actor sued Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, over stories published in February. One story alleged that his relationship with Khan was destroyed by a flirtation with a film executive. Another claimed Grant would attend Hurley's wedding to businessman Arun Nayar and had sponsored a chimpanzee at a British zoo as a gift. A third said he resented having to do publicity for his films. Grant's lawyer, Simon Smith, said "all of the above allegations and factual assertions are false." (AP)

THEY MUST BE SO PROUD OF THEIR MOMMY

'My kids are going to love this. This is my dream of being a Vegas showgirl come true.' Pamela Andrerson, announcing that she will replace Carmen Electra for three months in Hans Klok's new Las Vegas show, "The Beauty of Magic".