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On Thursday, Fox News announced that longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo was leaving the network.
The press release took pains to signal that she’d been fired: “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”
Oliver Darcy at Status was first to break the news that Bartiromo got axed for leaking confidential company information to the White House.
She made the mistake of thinking that the network and the administration were one and the same — an understandable error, since they operated as a seamless entity for almost a decade.
Bartiromo believed that her job was to support Trump and use her platform to let his agents spread their message. And for many years, it was. But now Trump is a lame duck whose disastrous policies are driving the country into a ditch, and Fox is trying to execute a delicate pivot.
Bartiromo doesn’t do delicate, and she’s not about to pivot. So now she’s out.
Which one is the parasite?
Fox and its hosts have been intimately entwined with Trump since he came down the golden escalator in 2015.
“The phone calls between President Trump and Sean Hannity come early in the morning or late at night, after the Fox News host goes off the air,” the Washington Post reported in 2018.
In 2019, Jeanine Pirro was suspended after questioning whether Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab was "indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution." She got her job back after Trump publicly demanded she be reinstated, warning the network not to go “politically correct” and hand its ratings lead to competitors.
Pirro is now the US attorney for DC, while another former Fox host, Pete Hegseth, serves as secretary of defense. And the exchange goes both ways: Trump’s former Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has her own show, and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah served for years as senior vice president.
And so Trump took it as a personal affront on election night 2020 when Fox’s decision desk correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden before any other network.
“Many great alternatives are forming & exist. Try @OANN & @newsmax, among others!” he ragetweeted.
Inside the network, this act of radical truth-telling was treated as a four-alarm fire, particularly as Newsmax experienced a temporary ratings spike.
"In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable,” Hannity whined to Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in a group text released in later litigation.
“It’s vandalism,” Carlson agreed.
“Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief,” Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott told Lachlan Murdoch. “It’s a question of trust[.] [T]he AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”
And so, instead of pissing off their audience by reporting the actual news, Fox made the calculated decision to push Trump’s flagrant lies about a stolen election.
“The Wind tells me I’m a ghost”
On November 8, 2020, the day after the network finally conceded that Biden had won, Bartiromo hosted Sidney Powell, a notorious purveyor of election conspiracy theories.
“Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software,” Bartiromo warbled. “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”
Powell went on to accuse Dominion of gross electoral fraud, with the connivance of congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign.
Before putting her on the air, Bartiromo had seen Powell’s evidence, which included an email from a person who claimed that “The Wind tells me I'm a ghost” and ”it appears that I was shot in the back shortly after submitting a tip to the FBI two years ago.”
![money. The recent COVID relief bills are simply one mechanism to try to feed money they’ve lost out on over the past 4 years back into that system. As an aside, I’ll throw this out there just because it’s so interesting...and related...SCOTUS Justice Scalia wasn’t accidentally shot during a hunting trip on John Poindexter’s Texas ranch. He was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp...a club for members of the Mega-Group, during a weeklong human hunting expedition. NEVER accept an invitation to be a guest at that camp. Ever. That being said. Who am I? And how do I know all of this? I spent most of my career (15+ years) as a successful technology analyst; an expert in the field of nanotechnology, which touches on everything. I was superbly accurate with my forecasts and ideas. I always thought I was just a really gifted that way, but it’s turned out to be a bit more than that. I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. Most were just odd - others were clearly predictions. Over time, they became more...vivid...and more...interactive. About ten years ago, an event took place that seemed to amplify these abilities, by vastly more than an order of magnitude. Although the most vivid “dreams” take place while dozing, they’re not normal dreams; but I’m not sure the Native American term “visions” really fits, either. It’s more like time-travel in a semi-conscious state; and all senses are involved. But that’s not all - when I’m awake, I see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear. There’s a movie, Thunderheart, in which the Native American sheriff explains it best to an FBI agent who is just learning to tap into his Native American heritage...he tells him to “listen to the wind”. That makes sense to me. Stranger still, I was in a car accident in 1992; and something took place that I’ve never been able to explain. For all intents and purposes, I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live. I breathe, I shop, I laugh, I get old, I walk the earth. The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it. Although, it appears that I was shot in the back shortly after submitting a tip to the FBI two years ago...at the time, I thought I just tripped and fell during a walk and bruised my ribs...but I had a vision about a year later in which I stood in the same spot and felt my soul leave my body. It was like having a band-aid being ripped off your skin. And yet, I continue to walk the earth. Despite that, the wind tells me that no one can harm me; it protects me and keeps me safe. Anyway, I’ve gotten a little off track, and I’ll be the first to admit that while the last bit is pretty wackadoodle, it’s relevant...and I can tell you this about everything else above: Time always...eventually...proves me correct. Kindest Regards, [redacted]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!e94u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51772bab-84f8-4b3e-af08-27390ee735cd_1178x1288.png "money. The recent COVID relief bills are simply one mechanism to try to feed money they’ve lost out on over the past 4 years back into that system. As an aside, I’ll throw this out there just because it’s so interesting...and related...SCOTUS Justice Scalia wasn’t accidentally shot during a hunting trip on John Poindexter’s Texas ranch. He was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp...a club for members of the Mega-Group, during a weeklong human hunting expedition. NEVER accept an invitation to be a guest at that camp. Ever. That being said. Who am I? And how do I know all of this? I spent most of my career (15+ years) as a successful technology analyst; an expert in the field of nanotechnology, which touches on everything. I was superbly accurate with my forecasts and ideas. I always thought I was just a really gifted that way, but it’s turned out to be a bit more than that. I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. Most were just odd - others were clearly predictions. Over time, they became more...vivid...and more...interactive. About ten years ago, an event took place that seemed to amplify these abilities, by vastly more than an order of magnitude. Although the most vivid “dreams” take place while dozing, they’re not normal dreams; but I’m not sure the Native American term “visions” really fits, either. It’s more like time-travel in a semi-conscious state; and all senses are involved. But that’s not all - when I’m awake, I see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear. There’s a movie, Thunderheart, in which the Native American sheriff explains it best to an FBI agent who is just learning to tap into his Native American heritage...he tells him to “listen to the wind”. That makes sense to me. Stranger still, I was in a car accident in 1992; and something took place that I’ve never been able to explain. For all intents and purposes, I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live. I breathe, I shop, I laugh, I get old, I walk the earth. The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it. Although, it appears that I was shot in the back shortly after submitting a tip to the FBI two years ago...at the time, I thought I just tripped and fell during a walk and bruised my ribs...but I had a vision about a year later in which I stood in the same spot and felt my soul leave my body. It was like having a band-aid being ripped off your skin. And yet, I continue to walk the earth. Despite that, the wind tells me that no one can harm me; it protects me and keeps me safe. Anyway, I’ve gotten a little off track, and I’ll be the first to admit that while the last bit is pretty wackadoodle, it’s relevant...and I can tell you this about everything else above: Time always...eventually...proves me correct. Kindest Regards, [redacted]")
In deposition, Bartiromo conceded that the email was “kooky.” But on air, she never pushed back as Powell accused Dominion and its competitor Smartmatic of multiple felonies. Similarly the network itself never pushed back on Bartiromo, or on Pirro and Lou Dobbs as they continued to air flagrant, defamatory lies.
That was a business decision that wound up costing it dearly in 2023, when it handed over $787 million to Dominion after years of bruising, expensive litigation. And it cost Bartiromo as well.
For a long time, she’d been able to maintain the fiction that she was still the serious financial journalist she’d been in the 1990s when she reported live from floor of the New York Stock Exchange. That’s pretty much impossible to do after you’ve been caught platforming a crank while crying to Steve Bannon that you’re “scared and sad” and “told my team we are not allowed to say pres elect at sll (sic). Not in scripts or in banners on air.”
“Enough with the sad! We need u," Bannon replied, launching into a five-point plan that involved winning both Senate seats in Georgia and then having Bartiromo run against Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2022.
"This is your moment," he urged.
The network remains
Bartiromo’s “moment” in politics came and went, and eventually Fox’s moment of panic passed as well. Newsmax and OAN did not steal away its audience. It remains the conservative behemoth, bundled into every basic cable package, whether viewers like it or not.
The network remembered that it was bigger than any star, firing Carlson in 2023. As Brian Stelter put it in his definitive book “Network of Lies,” "It wasn't one thing. It was everything."
When Kevin O'Leary appeared on Mornings with Maria this May and told viewers his "data scientists" had uncovered "two cells" of Chinese Communist Party operatives in Utah who were responsible for ginning up opposition to data centers, Fox quickly backed down.
Turns out, litigation isn’t so fun after all!
And while the network remains comically pro-Trump, it seems to have dawned on management that yoking itself to a president whose approval ratings are sinking like a stone is not a long-term growth strategy.
On July 16, Trump gave what he promised would be a blockbuster speech proving his electoral fraud claims once and for all. Fox dutifully aired it live during primetime, then instructed staff to give the fraud claims no further oxygen.
But while the network may have moved on from Trump’s boring tirades about 2020, Bartiromo has not.
She scheduled an interview with Trump’s aide Peter Navarro for the morning of July 17. Navarro is a conspiracy-addled economist who steers Trump into constant trade wars, and he and Bannon hatched the harebrained “Green Bay Sweep” plan to pressure more than a hundred members of Congress into blocking certification of the 2020 election. After refusing to testify to the January 6 Committee, Navarro and Bannon were both convicted of contempt of Congress.
When Bartiromo canceled on Navarro, she forwarded the internal text from management warning against covering Trump’s speech. Navarro then passed it to the White House as evidence of Fox’s perfidy, inadvertently sealing Bartiromo’s fate.
Bartiromo subordinated the needs of her employer to those of her real boss in the White House. And, as with Carlson, that was “one thing” too many.
The next act
Multiple outlets have reported that Bartiromo is in talks with CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss about a possible role at 60 Minutes.
Weiss already pulled a fully-vetted 60 Minutes segment on the CECOT torture allegations three hours before air, after asking producers to book Stephen Miller for “balance.” Adding a Fox reject who just got fired for putting the White House’s messaging needs first would be a choice.
Meanwhile, Bartiromo hired pugilistic media lawyer Bryan Freedman. Freedman’s clients include Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Don Lemon. He recently represented actor Justin Baldoni in his litigation against Blake Lively — litigation in which Baldoni was forced to pay out legal fees to both Lively and and the New York Times.
“The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false,” Freedman told The Hollywood Reporter. “Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise. Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.”
This raises the tantalizing prospect of further nasty, public squabbling. Maybe Bartiromo will be forced to go under oath again!
That won’t help Fox, and it probably won’t be great for Bartiromo’s career. But it will definitely make for good television.
That’s it for today
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I have always felt that it was just a matter of time before poor Maria stepped in it. I remember her interviewing Anthony Wiener (before we found out about him). They were having a back and forth about Medicare. Wiener was defending Medicare when Maria asked, “If Medicare is so good why aren’t you using it?” Wiener (who was then in his early 40’s) said, “Maria, you’re not eligible for Medicare until you’re 65.”
Maria (like her hero Trump) is incapable of being embarrassed.
Always room for another “reporter” at the Daily Stormer!