Until she was abruptly fired on Thursday, Maria Bartiromo had been a longtime fixture on Fox News. (Bartiromo denies that she was fired, noting that she is still on contract, but the network is certainly acting as if there has been a severance.) She’s worked on the network since 2012 and at the time of her firing was the host of no less than three programs: Sunday Morning Futures, on the flagship Fox News network, as well as the daily program Mornings With Maria and the Friday evening show Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street. On any given week, an avid Fox viewer could see her for around 16 hours. In addition to her prominence, she set the political tone for the network. Fox News has since its inception been right-wing, but few at the network could outdo Bartiromo’s servility to Donald Trump.

After Trump lost in 2020, Bartiromo was at the forefront of voicing unfounded allegations of voter fraud, which she and others at the network knew to be false. This made Bartiromo a central figure in two major lawsuits against the network launched by two voting software companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. Fox settled the Dominion suit in 2023 by acknowledging the claims of fraud by Dominion were false and agreeing to pay $787,500,000. The Smartmatic lawsuit is still ongoing.

The Dominion settlement made Fox News gun-shy. The network, even as it remains a cheerleader for Trump and MAGA, has been wary of repeating the errors that cost it nearly a billion dollars in court fees (and could still cost it more). As NPR notes, two leading Fox News personalities involved in the Dominion lawsuits have been fired over the past few years: Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson. A third defendant in the lawsuit, Jeanine Pirro, left Fox to work for the Trump administration.

Pirro’s trajectory is a common one. Fox has become a de facto farm team for the Trump White House. But this fusing of a propagandistic media outlet with the government raises a question: Who do Fox News stars really work for, Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch?

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Most of the time, this question is beside the point since Trump and Murdoch are almost always aligned. But the 2020 election conspiracy represents an important fissure in this alliance. Trump continues to foment conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, both as a salve for his ego and as a way to cast doubt on future election results, whether in the midterms or the 2028 general election, that might go against the GOP. Some of Murdoch’s employees such as Bartiromo share Trump’s agenda, and that puts them in tension with their boss, who cares about the bottom line of his company. Murdoch is reputedly worth more than $25 billion, but still there are only so many times he can pay off lawsuits that run to the tens of millions.

Writing in Status, Oliver Darcy offered an account of the firing that makes clear that Bartiromo was torn between two masters. In the end, she double-crossed Murdoch to stay in the good graces of Trump. The triggering incident started in July, when Trump gave a prime-time speech offering new conspiracy theories about the election. Behind the scenes, Fox News executives issued a directive telling top staffers such as Bartiromo to steer clear of the president’s new round of lies. The speech failed to make the splash that Trump expected. Then, according to Darcy:

Ultimately Bartiromo spilled the secret… divulging to the White House that Trump’s speech had received scant coverage on the channel because network bosses had ordered it so. I’m even told the text message in which Fox News brass offered their guidance was shared by Bartiromo with the White House. In doing so, Bartiromo not only effectively betrayed her employer, but also disclosed confidential company information, violating the terms of her employment agreement.

Bartiromo deserved to be fired. In truth, the real scandal is she wasn’t fired long ago. It is worth revisiting just how reckless her spreading of the election-denial lies was. As NPR noted in 2023, Fox News’ embrace of election denialism was always motivated by a crass hunt for ratings. After Fox News declared the election for Joe Biden in 2020, the network was rapidly losing viewers. Taking up the cause of election denial was a way to win back MAGA diehards. Bartiromo, in particular, elevated a letter she was given by attorney Sidney Powell that was filled with bizarre claims.

As NPR reports:

A woman who says the wind talks to her and put forth claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race that she admitted were “pretty wackadoodle” turns out to be a key source of allegations that Fox News presented, night after night, to millions of viewers late that fall….

The author of the memo in which Powell and Bartiromo put so much stock offered detailed and utterly false claims of how Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election for Biden. She also shared a bit about herself, writing that she gains insights from experiencing something “like time-travel in a semi-conscious state.”…

“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?… I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl,” the woman wrote in the email shared by Powell with Bartiromo and [Lou] Dobbs. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”

This e-mail was genuinely deranged, yet Bartiromo and other Fox anchors treated it as if it were credible. Furthermore, at the time senior Fox executives discussed amongst themselves the fact that the e-mail was unreliable. They knowingly allowed falsehoods to be aired, spurring not just conspiracy theories but also providing the ideological rationale for the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Bartiromo should have been fired the first time she went on air with the ludicrous claims of the e-mail. All those who went along with her lies should have been fired, too. But the network kept Bartiromo on air because of the ratings she brought in and because of her valuable connection with Donald Trump.

The firing of Bartiromo has nothing to do with accountability. It’s motivated by expedience, a way to limit the risk of future lawsuits. Fox has yet to have a real reckoning with its corrupt disregard for the truth.