The GOP has embarked on another presidential primary season, including a Fox Business Network debate on Wednesday night. Bartiromo, however, was absent from the moderators’ table — and wasn’t even scheduled to be among the Fox personalities providing pre- and post-debate analysis.
What a difference disgrace makes.
No self-respecting history of cable news can ignore Bartiromo’s ascent, which was built on hard work. Growing up in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, she checked coats at the family restaurant and worked at an off-track betting site that also employed her mother. After college, she snagged an internship at CNN and eventually worked at its business-news offshoot, CNNfn. By 1993, she had landed a reporting gig at CNBC and went on to a 20-year career there, standing out in a network full of smart business reporters. She was the first reporter to do live TV from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
But Bartiromo jumped to Fox in early 2014, a mistake with still-reverberating implications. As the Daily Beast pointed out, Bartiromo’s ratings, and those of the network, “soared” as she and her colleagues embraced Donald Trump’s divisive 2016 campaign for the presidency. That embrace involved not only promoting Trump’s agenda but also passing along smears of Hillary Clinton, including a retweet of a claim that the Democratic presidential candidate had once referred to Muslims as “sand n—ers.” Bartiromo blocked the Erik Wemple Blog from following her on Twitter after we called her out.
The outward manifestations of Bartiromo’s slide toward Trump toady — tweets, on-air pronouncements and the like — aligned with internal correspondence that became public as a result of the lawsuit filed in 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems. A company that provided voting technology to many states in the 2020 presidential election, Dominion alleged that Fox anchors had defamed the company by alleging — and allowing guests to allege — that the company had participated in vote-flipping schemes to benefit Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, among other falsehoods. Of the 20 statements challenged by Dominion in the litigation, Bartiromo was responsible for three.
During a Nov. 8, 2020, interview with election-denying lawyer Sidney Powell, Bartiromo prompted, “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.” A Fox Business executive confided to a colleague that Bartiromo “has GOP conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes.” And in a text message to one-time Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Bartiromo lamented Biden’s victory, “I am watching the world move forward. & it’s so upsetting steve. I want to see massive fraud exposed. Will he be able to turn this around. I told my team we are not allowed to say pres elect at [all]. Not in scripts or in banners on air. Until this moves through the courts.”
The clincher for Bartiromo’s credibility outage came from a now-famous email that surfaced in the Dominion litigation. When asked for evidence for her election-theft claims, Powell forwarded to Bartiromo an email from a source with specific allegations of election wrongdoing. That source also claimed that “the Wind tells me I am a ghost,” said she had been “internally decapitated” and admitted to being “wackadoodle.” Bartiromo received that email a day before hosting Powell and taking her allegations seriously.
Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle the Dominion case.
In greeting the settlement, a Dominion lawyer said, “Lies have consequences,” though there weren’t too many when it came to staffing at Fox News. The network parted ways with host Tucker Carlson a week after the settlement, and Lou Dobbs, another focus of the litigation, had lost his show in early 2021. The management team at Fox News stayed in place, including Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace.
In Bartiromo’s case, the full set of consequences is riding on a slow-moving train. On Wednesday night, she was distinguished by her absence from the lineup of Fox moderators. The debate, which aired on Fox Business Network with a simulcast on Fox News, was moderated by Dana Perino (Fox News) and Stuart Varney (Fox Business), as well as Ilia Calderón (Univision). A full slate of commentators from the Fox networks were to provide pre-debate analysis, including Dagen McDowell, Sean Duffy, Larry Kudlow, Bret Baier, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, Harold Ford Jr., Karl Rove, Kellyanne Conway and others.
But no Bartiromo, and the logic behind her benching isn’t hard to divine: Even if the moderators don’t ask about election fraud, the topic is just one stray remark from bubbling up in the debate. And then the Fox Business anchor famous for her involvement with the “wackadoodle” email would have to sort things out. Cue the corporate freakout over brand protection.
Yet, Bartiromo is apparently still just fine to represent the network on weekday mornings (“Mornings with Maria,” on Fox Business) and Sunday mornings (“Sunday Morning Futures,” on Fox News).
And she’s still interested in election integrity! In a June edition of “Sunday Morning Futures,” Bartiromo asked guest Newt Gingrich whether Republicans were doing enough to secure fair elections. He responded that they’re taking some measures, “But in states dominated by Democrats, like New York, Illinois, California, you just have to assume that the machine will steal as much as it can.”
Bartiromo responded, “Wow.”
The bigger lesson from Bartiromo’s career dive relates to media culture. When Bartiromo was at CNBC, her métier was serious business and economic topics. When she moved to an environment that rewarded indulgence of flimsy right-wing talking points, she indulged flimsy right-wing talking points — with a fervor that outpaced even the conspiratorial inclinations of her own employer.
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