On Thursday, Fox News announced that Maria Bartiromo was “no longer with Fox News Media.” This created the impression that she had been fired. Bartiromo’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, pushed back hard on the firing narrative, disputing the reports outright.
New reporting from Dylan Byers at Puck gives us some details about what actually happened. From where I sit, it looks less like a firing and more like a slow-motion punishment for trying to do her job.
So what set this all off?
It starts with President Trump’s primetime address in July on the 2020 election, in which he laid out allegations of Chinese interference and calling on Congress to tighten voting rules before the midterms. Seeing as how it was a big primetime speech, Bartiromo naturally planned to cover it on her show.
As it turned out, Bartiromo had been planning to cover Trump’s speech on her show, according to sources familiar with her plans. She had also planned to book Peter Navarro, a senior counselor to Trump who has aggressively pushed the voter fraud narrative, to talk about the president’s remarks and the administration’s broader concerns over election integrity.
However, the night before the speech, Ralph Giordano, Fox Business Network‘s senior vice president of programming, texted Bartiromo’s production team, instructing them not to cover the speech.
When Bartiromo renewed her Fox News Media contract in February of last year, she reportedly negotiated language specifically barring Giordano from having any say over her show. He kept meddling anyway.
Navarro told Byers in a Friday interview that Bartiromo sent him a screenshot of Giordano’s instructions to prove management was blocking her coverage, which he described as “censoring” it. Navarro said he passed the information “up the chain” to senior administration officials. An unnamed high-ranking White House official then called Fox News leadership to complain, effectively outing Bartiromo as the source of the leaked guidance.
It came on the heels of a report from the outlet Status claiming Bartiromo had shared internal editorial guidance with the administration, a report both Fox News and a representative for Bartiromo declined to comment on. Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace were reportedly furious, though they let her show continue through the summer before pulling her off the air last Thursday.
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Fox’s reluctance to air the speech in the first place traces back to Bartiromo being named as a defendant in the Dominion and Smartmatic defamation lawsuits, both stemming from 2020 election coverage. Puck also noted that Giordano and Bartiromo already had a tense relationship at the network.
The troubling thing about this story is that the Democrats have long regarded any Republican who questions the 2020 election as a threat to democracy itself, even though there were documented irregularities in several battleground states that year.
However, it was the Democrats who first made it acceptable to question the results of the elections, beginning with George W. Bush’s wins in 2000 and 2004, and then again with Trump’s victory in 2016. The same media outlets that for years promoted the theory of Russia’s collusion in 2016 now regard any examination of 2020 as nonsense proven wrong. The approved story was that 2020 was the safest, most secure election in history, and anyone who said otherwise was undermining “our democracy.”
Bartiromo appears to have learned what happens to people who try to cover a story that contradicts that line.
PJ Media has reached out to Fox Corporation, but has not heard back in time for publication.
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