Maria Bartiromo Is Still Doing the Kind of Journalism That Got Fox News Sued For Billions

Few people are as ill-equipped to handle an interview with an election denier as Maria Bartiromo, whose naïve (I’m being charitable) willingness to embrace stolen election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election helped get Fox News slapped with two multi-billion dollar election lawsuits seen internally as a major threat to the cable news network.

And yet, on Sunday, Bartiromo hosted Kari Lake, a notorious election denier, for an interview on her Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures.

The interview proved Bartiromo has learned nothing from the 2020 affair. To the contrary, she presented Lake to her audience as a credible conservative with valid grievances.

Just like former President Donald Trump, Lake began claiming the election was stolen before it had even taken place and has since launched a ridiculous and doomed attempt to overturn it. Her challenge was struck down in court, her opponent Katie Hobbs was sworn in as governor, yet she continues to insist she is the “the duly elected governor.” She, very clearly, is not.

Bartiromo did not challenge Lake on that reality. Instead, she asked: “You, a minute ago, said the other side sabotaged you. How did they do it, and how far are you willing to take this lawsuit?”

In response, Lake put forward a series of debunked claims about the Arizona election being fraudulent, claims that went unchallenged by the anchor. “We will not allow our elections to be stolen in Arizona,” Lake concluded.

The interview was reminiscent of the kind of journalism the Fox News anchor conducted after the 2020 election, journalism that led media critics to wonder what happened to Maria Bartiromo?, forced Fox News to air a fact check of her own election claims during her show, and ultimately landed her as a defendant in Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox and some of its top anchors.

Bartiromo was perhaps the second-most eager purveyor of stolen election conspiracy theories after the 2020 presidential race at Fox News. (The most eager, Lou Dobbs, was fired by Fox after the network was sued.)

In a series of interviews after the election with the likes of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, Bartiromo was equally credulous of their absurd claims, and even pushed her own.

She claimed “software made by Smartmatic that was changing votes from Trump to Biden.” She claimed “if you’ve got Democrats in charge from here on out, they’re in charge of the machines, you’ll never see a Republican in the White House again.”

There was never any evidence that voting machines changed a single vote from Biden to Trump. That was made clear in the fact check that Fox News was forced to air under legal threat from Smartmatic.

In perhaps the most shocking example, Bartiromo declared a full month after the election that an “intel source” told her “President Trump did in fact win the election.”

That’s not just “denialism.” That’s delusion. Trump did not win the election; he lost by more than seven million votes and 74 electoral college votes.

Giuliani and Powell were both discredited on the right in the months that followed — even in the eyes of Trump, who was said to have privately mocked their election claims as “crazy.”

While the original election fraud crusaders are no longer welcome on the air at Fox News — two multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits will inspire at least some booking humility — a new crop, led by Kari Lake, is finding fertile ground to spread fresh falsehoods with impunity.

Fox News has claimed in defense against the Smartmatic and Dominion lawsuits that Trump’s claims about the election were eminently newsworthy, a matter of public interest that Fox was reporting on neutrally.

Of course, asking questions is an anchor’s job. But Bartiromo’s gabs with election deniers hardly look like journalism. Giuliani, Powell, and Lake should be treated with skepticism, not reverence. Interviewing them without challenging their claims is like earnestly asking a flat-earther what really happens if we keep sailing west.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.