Did Maria Bartiromo Sell Her Soul to Trump?
By: Jennifer Friebely
Tags: Fox News, Election 2020, Trump, Media Criticism, Politics

Did Maria Bartiromo Sell Her Soul to Trump?

Screengrab by author

Maria Bartiromo’s name used to be synonymous with leading-edge business news. She cut her teeth broadcasting on CNBC from the New York Stock Exchange floor — and built her reputation on reporting about business.

If a Fortune 500 company had news it wanted to break, they went to Maria Bartiromo. Conversely, if Maria Bartiromo asked to interview you — your company was getting noticed, and it often spelled “success.” She was wired into the NYSE’s beat — even covering my father’s retirement in 2004 — the day we rang the closing bell. He was among the last of a dying breed of a stockbroker, the “floor broker” — and Maria talked about it. It was so long ago. I can’t find a clip, or I would link it here.

Maria Bartiromo built up years of credibility reporting on the big guys and the floor brokers too. I think that’s why I’m so bothered by her recent departure from being a real journalist regarding Trump. I suppose her employment at Fox News would eventually influence her — but it seems she is starstruck by the president. Perhaps that is an understatement. She allows Trump and his surrogates to take over her air space without challenge to spread false and misleading information to vulnerable Americans — those watching Fox. The latter are likely Trump supporters who have been fed so much propaganda; they no longer know the truth.

Maria Bartiromo sold her credibility to Donald Trump. She erodes all of her years of work every time she opens her mouth.

Near the end of her interview with Mick Mulvaney, at 4:38, Maria asks about the odds of reversing election results — even though the electoral college has voted! Mick Mulvaney (I’m paraphrasing) says that Trump should stop focusing on his loss and worry about Georgia’s Senate race. Only then will the GOP be able to investigate whether he [Trump] lost the election fraudulently. She looks visibly disappointed in his response. Here’s the interview:

Twitter @MariaBartiromo

Now, Maria Bartiromo is being called out by fellow journalists for what appears to be journalistic bias towards Donald Trump. Both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have published stories lambasting Bartiromo for her lack of integrity. CNN’s Brian Stelter does a story as well (see below). Given her responsibility to report the news correctly — it is dangerous to our democracy.

She is aiding the president in airing his unfounded and inaccurate grievances on national television to an already vulnerable audience of Trump supporters who don’t understand what happened because they have not been told the truth.

There are calls on Twitter that are even more direct:

Twitter @RexChapman

Here she is being severely criticized by Brian Stelter on CNN — deservedly for her November interview with Trump. “Bartiromo is just teeing up Trump to lie to viewers:”

Twitter @ReliableSources

Stelter and his guests discussed Bartiromo’s interview with Trump as pure propaganda. She did not challenge Trump or ask questions. In one case Bartiromo responded with “Wow” to one of his statements. Wow — just wow.

Here is how The Washington Post writer Sarah Ellison in her story, What happened to Maria Bartiromo? Describes the Bartiromo interview with Trump:

Nearly four weeks after the election, the president of the United States had granted his first interview since a defeat he refused to accept — and Bartiromo was the journalist he chose. It seemed, fleetingly, like a fulfillment of the great expectations that the media world had for Bartiromo going back 25 years when she was a vibrant new presence in cable news, a young woman breaking barriers in financial journalism and going toe-to-toe with the corporate titans and stock-market wizards of the era, many of them men twice her age. “Mr. President, you have said many times that this election was rigged, that there was much fraud and the facts are on your side,” Bartiromo opened. “Let’s start there. Please go through the facts. Characterize what took place.” What followed was a nearly uninterrupted monologue propelled by the president’s baseless claims. Trump insisted that something mysterious had happened election night, when it appeared he was far ahead in key states and then suddenly was not. In fact, it was the predictable phenomenon of big-city votes taking longer to count, combined with this year’s late-counted surge of absentee ballots that surveys had long indicated would be dominated by Democrats. Far from challenging Trump on these assertions, Bartiromo backed him up: “Then they did dumps,” she said, in the parlance of election conspiracy theorists. “Big massive dumps, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over.” If anything, she seemed to buy completely into the president’s evidence-free claims of fraud that have been repeatedly rejected by federal and state officials, including many of Trump’s own allies and appointees. “This is disgusting,” she said, “and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted.”

Just like all of the other personalities at Fox, it appears that Maria Bartiromo has become another mouthpiece for the Trump administration. In her interview for The Washington Post story, Bartiromo says,

What happened to Maria Bartiromo? She maintains she’s no MAGA die-hard — just a journalist motivated by a search for truth. Her take on Trump: “Here is this guy who comes from Queens, New York, doesn’t care what he says and who he says it to, goes into Washington to drain the swamp. . . . And I think his presence threatened some people’s viability.” In other words, a highly relatable character for another outer-borough kid who managed to press her way into Manhattan’s moneyed corridors. “Ever since I started covering President Trump and covering the coup and the effort to take him down, I became the enemy of the media and the activists and the mobs,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post, again echoing his language (as well as some of his hard-wired sense of grievance). “I have an edge. I mean, I stick to my guns and I’m not easily blown off.”

The mere fact that she is saying that there is a coup and an effort to take down Trump seems a bit off the rails for any journalist with integrity. I wonder if she realizes what she sounds like when her words are read out loud?

Conclusion.

To me, it’s pretty apparent where journalistic integrity begins and ends here — and Maria Bartiromo has cashed out and sold her soul to Donald Trump like so many others. For what?