Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News and Fox Business. And apparently with so little advance warning that they barely had a chance to line up guest hosts for her various shows across the Fox ecosystem, let alone permanent replacements. As is so often the case in our current media environment, the news is both pretty significant as well as being fundamentally stupid. Bartiromo was once a big and reasonably well-respected business news anchor/reporter. But in recent years she banked very hard in the direction of hardcore Trumper and fairly big conspiracy theory yakker. I’ve never known the precise logic of her trajectory. But I’m not sure that matters that much.
It’s safe to say these things — this kind of zero-notice, one sentence press release defenestration — don’t happen without brass discovering something very, very bad. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.” And since being a crazy nutball isn’t bad at Fox News it points in the direction of some hard to ignore rule-breaking or reputational stinkbomb. Of course, we can’t rule out Bartiromo waking up this morning and deciding to spend more time in Connecticut … forever. But I’m leaning against that.
It’s true we can’t rule out a Tucker Carlson-style scenario in which we never precisely know why a high-profile Foxer gets bounced. It might be a thing where Rupert Murdoch, already on the brink of eternity, consulted the entrails of a ritual sacrifice and it just said clearly that Bartiromo had to go.
In any case, Bartiromo is out, to the great chagrin of Aaron Rupar, Acyn and other videoclip jockeys.
Late Update: Daily Beast reports that Bartiromo’s last day on air was in early August, something I didn’t know. That adds a significant piece of the puzzle and suggests that something had been brewing for two or three weeks. But it raises as many questions as it answers, since that lead time, if that’s what it was, didn’t help Fox manage a more organized set of post-Maria programming changes.
