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The Fox-Trump Tightrope

Columbia Journalism Review · Jem Bartholomew · last updated

What does Maria Bartiromo’s ouster mean for MAGA media?

There’s trouble in MAGA-media land. On September 3, Fox News released a terse statement: “Effective today, Maria Bartiromo”—one of the network’s most prominent on-air talents—“is no longer with FOX News Media.” Bartiromo, a favorite of Donald Trump’s, hosted three Fox shows. Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo was averaging 1.8 million viewers for the year to date, the Wall Street Journal reported this month, citing Nielsen data—a lot of eyeballs, even if it put Bartiromo behind other Fox hosts such as Jesse Watters (who drew an average total audience of 3.2 million in the second quarter of this year), Sean Hannity (2.8 million), and Bret Baier (2.7 million). Starting in Trump’s first term, Bartiromo, whom Fox poached from CNBC in 2014, slid ever deeper into the MAGA quagmire. By 2019, according to a profile of Bartiromo published in Institutional Investor, “What happened to Maria?” had become a recurring question in New York media and finance circles.

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