The media beat lost its collective mind Thursday afternoon when Fox News announced that Maria Bartiromo was out effective immediately. Part of the reason for the freak out is not just that it came out of the blue, but that the relatively terse press release gave no reason for her exit and offered, “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”
Every newsletter, Slack channel and group text in the media biz spent the next few hours speculating what the hell happened. Even I got in the act, tweeting “I’ve got zero insight into Maria Batiromo’s sudden exit from Fox, but I suspect it might be related to the ongoing Smartmatic litigation over election fraud. Total gut feeling.” I was partly right.
Oliver Darcy later reported that her ouster resulted from her sharing internal network guidance with the White House, which is, by any measure, a fireable offense. CNN found a source to confirm the guidance existed while Mediaite reported her own staff had been barred from talking to her for weeks. Puck’s Dylan Byers later added that she’d been off the air since August 9, an unnoticed detail that doesn’t speak well of the media reporters who missed it, or of Bartiromo’s broad influence.
By Friday morning it was still the biggest story in the political media beat. It was my lead narrative in my Morning Frame newsletter; Drudge had it stacked five lines deep under MONEY HONEY OUT AT FOX and Trump had posted that she was “a total professional, and a true warrior” whose fans “will not be happy.” To be fair to all involved, everyone’s breathless reactions were entirely justified. Not because of what Bartiromo does, but more so what she represents. And the details of this story suggest a much bigger narrative that most are completely overlooking.
To fully appreciate the scale of the story, you have to consider the broader context. In late July, Trump claimed China interfered in the 2020 election in a primetime address. The details he provided seemed sketchy at best, and the skeptical news media largely ignored it, including Fox News.
An executive at Fox Business directed staff that the network wouldn’t be carrying or pursuing the claim, which Bartiromo wanted to pursue regardless, a loyal service she provided to Trump’s past baseless election denial claims. When the White House reportedly asked her why the story wasn’t on the air, she sent officials a screenshot of the executive’s guidance. The White House then confronted Fox News executives about the directive, and after its own investigation into how that information got to the Executive Branch, they pulled her off television, effectively letting her go on the spot. One of the more stunning side notes to this was that NOTHING was said for almost a month until Thursday’s announcement. Her Executive Producer is out too, and the network called the whole thing a business decision.
That’s the tick-tock, and it’s a pretty good one. She took her own employer’s editorial decision and handed it to the people the decision was about, which is a hell of a thing for an anchor to do. And it explains why the punishment is so heavy for what the trades keep calling a leak but is a much bigger deal.
But as fascinating as the details might be, I see it as smaller than a much bigger story, which almost nobody said out loud on Thursday. Trump gave a speech claiming a foreign power rigged the last election, and the highest-rated, most influential, and Trump-friendly cable news network decided ahead of time and in writing that it wouldn’t carry or pursue the claim. There are loads of reasons behind this decision, ranging from what I called at the time Trump’s naked attempt to manufacture a crisis ahead of the midterms so he could federalize elections, to the network’s $786 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in 2021. Regardless of the motivations, the network chose to do the right thing.
Bartiromo is the Fox News anchor who is ostensibly most loyal to the president. She tried to get around the network’s clear direction by going to the White House staff. That’s a network drawing a hard line through the story Trump has reached for every time an election has gone against him. That’s significant at any time, but even more so with a midterm election just two months away.
I’ve been remarkably tough on Fox News over the years, and have praised them as well when they’ve deserved it. But credit where due: Fox News handled a genuinely dangerous situation professionally, deliberately, and with principle. It was dealing with one of the most Trump-connected people on its payroll and a president who openly demands loyalty from the press, and the network did the right thing anyway. If you’re sitting in the West Wing, that should scare you a lot more than losing a friendly Sunday host.
I’ve been making this argument for months. Back in April I wrote that Fox’s real power over Trump lives in what it declines to cover, and that no transcript search will ever find the stories a network decides to skip. In this case, it's ignoring a story that Trump wants reported, which hurts his narrative agenda with his biggest and most loyal audience. Just last month, I argued that a real fight between Trump and Fox News would end in a first-round knockout, because Fox News has all the power by owning the audience and knowing it can hurt him just by withholding attention and protection instead of attacking him. Both columns described a working dynamic that leaves no evidence behind. This week, there was a screenshot. And it matters more because of who that evidence took down.
Let’s say Fox News had done this to some unknown producer, or an interchangeable weekend contributor? Nobody would care.
Bartiromo has been at Fox since 2014 and is a big deal at the network. Sunday Morning Futures has been one of the most-watched weekend shows in cable news for years. But her programming decisions played a big role in the Dominion defamation case, and she’s reportedly a named defendant in the Smartmatic suit, too.
Lest we forget just how far gone she was by the end of 2020, because the contrast with what unfolded this week tells a different story. On November 7, 2020, Sidney Powell emailed Bartiromo the Dominion vote-flipping theory. The email’s only source described herself as “internally decapitated” and said the wind had told her she was a ghost. Dominion’s lawyers later called the whole thing “wackadoodle.” Bartiromo wrote back that she’d just briefed Eric Trump on it, and the next morning she put Powell on Sunday Morning Futures and teed her up with “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.” The Fox executive who ran the weekend shows later testified he would never have let the claim air if he’d known what it rested on.
And that’s not even the craziest part. On the morning the Electoral College met just five weeks later, Bartiromo told her Fox Business audience that “an intel source” had informed her “President Trump did in fact win the election” and that the Supreme Court needed to “stop the clock.” She never named the source and never produced anything close to evidence.
Bartiromo was caught trying a new version of this again. But this time the network said no before it aired. Then, after learning how she tried to go around them and go straight to the White House, they showed her the door. Can you blame them? Give Fox News all the credit it deserves, and don’t water it down. The network drew a line on the president’s baseless election claims and hasn’t budged when Trump came out for her.
Fox News paid Dominion a ton of money in a settlement, and is still in litigation with Smartmatic over alleged election denialism, so this might have much less to do with principle and everything to do with legal exposure. The network has zero interest in giving some attorney new election-fraud evidence just sixty days before a vote, or any time for that matter. It’s a fair point, but also exactly why this holds. The legal fallout from the 2020 election gave Fox News $785 million reasons to enforce tougher standards on unsupported election-rigging claims. Or, put another way, it seems to have learned that the best way to stop winning stupid prizes like 10-figure settlements? Stop playing the stupid games to begin with.
Which brings us back to Trump and the White House and why they should be freaked out about this story, and it has almost nothing to do with Bartiromo. Trump can lose CNN, and ABC and the Times and the Post and every editorial board in the country, and it doesn’t cost him anything, because none of them can talk a Republican voter into believing an election was stolen. Newsmax and the right-wing podcast set can try, but there is no media institution that’s better positioned to sell this or any claim to a mass conservative audience than the network that’s been the most-watched in cable news since 2002.
Sixty days out from the midterms, six Senate seats are now listed as toss-ups on a map where Republicans hold 53. It’s an entirely reasonable bet that Trump will want a story about election fraud in November, a story he reliably goes for whenever a vote has gone against him. The network he most needs to run that story, though, has now shown, in writing, that it will not pursue his China interference claim. And the White House also learned something else along the way that may be more concerning: all its access to Fox News talent buys it no leverage whatsoever over Fox News.
Bartiromo looked at the weird ménage à trois that included Trump, herself, and Fox News and misread who worked for whom. The network corrected her. The correction was addressed to her. The White House was cc’d. Whether anyone in the Executive Branch gets the very loud and clear message before November is a separate question, and given how that building handles bad news, I wouldn’t count on it.
Let's call it enlightened self-interest. Murdoch is the heaviest of heavy hitters and I appreciate having the roots of this exposed, as is your habit, Mr. Colby. Let us pray that even the densest cohort of the collective people of the United States act accordingly.
Solid, sound article. Thank you