Reporters live by the leak. Sometimes, they die by the leak too … if they’re the leaker. Allegedly.
Word leaked out yesterday that Fox Business Channel and longtime host Maria Bartiromo had parted ways. At first, observers expected to hear that she had left to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary. However, her former booking producer Breanna Morello made it sound as though Fox cut ties with Bartiromo rather than the other way around:
As I noted in last night’s Final Word, the situation was confusing enough to become a topic in Vice President J.D. Vance’s press briefing at the White House. When asked about it, Vance seemed surprised to hear the news, calling her a “very very dear friend.” Vance also said he didn’t think she would be coming into the White House:
Late yesterday, word finally got out about a dispute between Fox and Bartiromo that had boiled for weeks. Dylan Byers reported it last night for Puck on Twitter:
A Fox Business executive sent a text to Fox Business producers informing them that that story could not go to air.
Bartiromo took a screen shot of the guidance and sent it to senior White House officials.
Fox News leadership learned about that after receiving a call from the White House, which they viewed as a fireable offense.
Fox pulled Bartiromo from air after Aug. 9. She was fired today. I have also learned that her executive producer Patrick Ignozzi was also fired after the annoucnement.
Maria had resigned her contract with Fox last February.
“Resigned” likely meant “re-signed,” of course. Byers promised more for Puck today, although at least as of the moment, it has yet to surface. If true, though, that certainly would explain why Fox took Bartiromo off the air. Getting leaks from the White House makes reporters very valuable; giving leaks to the White House makes them expendable. That may be especially true at Fox these days, where the Murdochs were the target of a lawsuit from Donald Trump that is still wending its way through the courts. If Bartiromo leaked internal communications to a person who’s already suing them – and that’s still just an allegation – it’s a wonder that it took this long to get the axe.
Byers did add another juicy tidbit last night. Bartiromo has hired a well-known attorney to handle the situation with Fox. Bryan Freedman is a heavyweight in the entertainment industry, described by the Hollywood Reporter in 2024 as a “street fighter” and “the Dark Knight”:
In 2021, ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele was suspended following comments she made on a podcast, including calling parent company Disney’s vaccine mandates “sick” and questioning why Barack Obama considers himself Black when he was raised by his white mother. When she returned to her job, she felt she’d been sidelined from key on-air opportunities. So she dialed one of her closest friends, Chris Harrison, for advice. They’d gotten to know each other while co-hosting the Miss America pageant and the Scripps National Spelling Bee. He, too, had recently lost a big gig — as host of ABC’s The Bachelor, after defending a contestant accused of racism.
“Chris said, ‘I know who you need to talk to — my lawyer. He’ll be calling you momentarily,’ ” Steele remembers. “Within five minutes, Bryan Freedman was on the phone with me.” Steele left ESPN — she now has a podcast at Bill Maher’s Club Random Studios and will voice an upcoming animated series for conservative media outfit The Daily Wire — but was pleased by the settlement Freedman clinched. “He’s the kind of person you need if you’re David fighting Goliath,” she says. “Little me versus Disney? He’s the defender of what’s right. He fought for me when I didn’t even think I was worthwhile. He made me feel fearless when I was at my most vulnerable.”
Freedman, the divisive Hollywood attorney who’s referred to himself as a “pit bull” and is known for a rabidity and ruthlessness that can make even his fellow ferocious practitioners marvel in astonishment, has ascended as a powerhouse in recent years, becoming the go-to for alpha dogs who see themselves as the underdogs in a crisis.
Bartiromo didn’t hire Freedman just to clean up the remaining contractual issues. This looks like war. And to be fair, we haven’t heard Bartiromo’s side of this yet, so stay tuned, because this might be something else entirely once all the facts are on the table.
Exit question: Does this fight actually enhance Bartiromo’s chances of replacing Leavitt?
More at:
Here Are More Details on What Happened to Maria Bartiromo
We know the full story behind Maria Bartiromo’s removal from the airwaves of Fox Business. Some of the initial reporting has been clarified, and other details have been made more specific. Dylan Byers at Puck had the story:
On July 16, President Trump gave a primetime speech about election integrity in which he attempted to revive long-disproven doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The president alleged that China had sought to interfere with the electoral process, and called on Congress to enact stricter voting requirements ahead of the midterms. A day earlier, Ralph Giordano, the senior vice president of programming for the Fox Business Network, sent a text message to Maria Bartiromo’s producers with guidance to forgo coverage of the speech on her upcoming show. Giordano’s primary intended recipient was ostensibly Patrick Ignozzi, the executive producer of Bartiromo’s show Mornings With Maria on Fox Business.
[…]
Regardless, Bartiromo renewed her contract with Fox News Media in February of last year, and asked for specific provisions to ensure that Giordano would have no influence or oversight of her show, according to sources with knowledge of the contract negotiations. Nevertheless, Giordano continued to exert his broader influence through editorial guidance, such as the text message he sent to Ignozzi and other producers on July 15, which Ignozzi subsequently sent to Bartiromo.
As it turned out, Bartiromo had been planning to cover Trump’s speech on her show, according to sources familiar with her plans. She had also planned to book Peter Navarro, a senior counselor to Trump who has aggressively pushed the voter fraud narrative, to talk about the president’s remarks and the administration’s broader concerns over election integrity.
In an interview on Friday, Navarro told me that when Bartiromo received Giordano’s guidance, she took a screenshot and forwarded it to him to tell him that management was not letting her cover the speech—or, in his words, “censoring” it. Navarro subsequently passed that information “up the chain,” he said, informing senior administration officials of the guidance. One high-ranking White House official, whom Navarro declined to identify, reached out to Fox News leadership to express their frustration with the decision. (Status first reported yesterday that Bartiromo had shared internal editorial guidance with the administration. Both Fox News and a representative for Bartiromo declined to comment.)
Bartiromo wanted to report on President Trump’s July address on election interference, which included details about Beijing’s efforts to undermine our elections. Given that Bartiromo was named in the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits, the network decided not to air the speech.
Yet Bartiromo was ready to go with the primetime address this summer and had booked Peter Navarro as a guest. When told of the program change, she shared the message with Navarro, who forwarded it to the Trump White House. A high-ranking official, whom Navarro declined to name, then contacted the network, outing Bartiromo as the source. This incensed top Fox executives, Fox News Media C.E.O. Suzanne Scott and president Jay Wallace, who allowed her show to continue throughout the summer before yanking her off the air on August 9. The final episode of Morning with Maria aired on September 3, the day the network officially announced her departure.
She is slated to be off-air for the foreseeable future- a ghost firing, if you will- though Bartiromo’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, who has a lengthy list of high-level media clients, has strongly pushed back on claims that Bartiromo was fired.
She signed an extension with the network last February. Puck added that Giordano and Bartiromo were not on the best of terms at the network as well.
More at:
Maria Bartiromo Is Suddenly Out at Fox and No One Is Sure Why
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