Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business and Fox News host who has falsely claimed that – according to an “intel source” – President Donald Trump won the November election, will be among six rotating hosts as Fox News expands its evening lineup of extremist opinion shows into the 7 PM hour. Fox is moving its “straight news” show, “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” to 3 PM.
“Maria Bartiromo has been the source of some of the most destructive conspiracy theories at Fox Business and Fox News…particularly in the past few months,” tweeted Yashar Ali, a New York Magazine and HuffPost freelance journalist who’s broken major stories about public figures in the media and politics.
“But what is Fox going to do…fire her?” he added. “They allowed her to book guests like Sidney Powell.”
Powell is the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist attorney who is being sued for $1.3 billion for alleged defamation by Dominion, the voting machine manufacturer.
Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake noted that Bartiromo “has spent the last two months unquestioningly parroting Trump’s voter fraud allegations.”
“She also recently cited an unnamed ‘intel source telling me that President Trump did in fact win the election.'”
Bartiromo last month in fact did claim that, according to an “intel source,” Trump actually won, which is false. Here’s video of that false claim:
The Daily Beast’s media reporter Max Tani adds, “If I were Trish Regan, I’d be pretty upset that I got pushed out of Fox for doing one little COVID conspiracy theory while Maria Bartiromo has spend months entertaining election fraud theories and got a promotion!”
Vox’s Aaron Rupar notes that “Bartiromo lets Trump lie with impunity” in this clip from late November, but that allegation is actually true for most of Trump’s appearances with Bartiromo.
Last August Bartiromo lied, telling President Trump there was “a coup” against him.
Just this past Friday James Murdoch, the son of Rupert Murdoch who owns the multi-national media empire that includes Fox News, decried “media property owners” and their news outlets for spreading dangerous disinformation.