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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. 

Fox did not give a reason for parting with Bartiromo. But reports in Status, CNN, and the New York Times said she was shown the door for sharing an internal note from Fox bosses that instructed staff to limit coverage of a Trump speech on July 16 that sought to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections. It had been surprising, as I noted at the time, that Fox News barely covered the speech, and that Baier, Fox’s chief political anchor, said the network was “not in a position to assess the accuracy of the president’s statements.” The morning after Trump’s remarks, Bartiromo wanted to book Peter Navarro, the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing policy, to chew over the speech, but she was blocked. After Bartiromo was ousted, Navarro wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Times in which he claimed to have seen a text message to Bartiromo from Ralph Giordano, a Fox Business executive, that said: “Hi—We don’t want to promote it or push to the speech at all. We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.” (It’s worth noting that Bartiromo’s lawyer Bryan Freedman denied to the press that she had been fired. He did not respond to an interview request seeking clarification. When I reached Fox, a representative told me only that the company’s press release “speaks for itself.”) 

Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters and avid watcher of right-wing media, told me that the Bartiromo episode speaks to the intriguing—and delicate—relationship between the Trump White House and Fox News, which he considers a “second cabinet of advisers to the president.” Trump has “an expectation that everyone at Fox will be maximally supportive of his administration at all times. When he sees any coverage that is anything less than that, he will speak out against it.” Bartiromo’s real crime, Gertz argued, may have been that she made all of Fox’s other hosts look bad in the eyes of the White House. “I don’t know the extent to which there’s a broader strategy at play,” he told me, “versus trying to ensure something like that doesn’t happen again.”

Bartiromo, who is fifty-eight, joins former Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, who were ousted by network executives following their eagerness to cover Trump’s pet grievances and outlandish falsehoods—notably, his contention that he won the 2020 presidential election. Another Fox personality who embraced those grievances, Jeanine Pirro, left the network in May of last year to join the administration. The willingness of these personalities to air Trump’s election-related conspiracy theories proved expensive for Fox in 2023, when the network was forced to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems. (A separate defamation suit, brought by Smartmatic, is ongoing.) The cases have made Fox “gun-shy,” Jeet Heer wrote for The Nation the other day; getting rid of Bartiromo is “motivated by expedience, a way to limit the risk of future lawsuits.” The Times had a similar interpretation, with a headline calling the network “increasingly cautious.” According to the Los Angeles Times, Bartiromo was earning around six million dollars a year, which Fox must keep paying her until her contract expires. That’s a lot of money, but still pocket change compared with the 787.5 million dollars it was forced to pay Dominion to settle that case. 

Is there more than just Fox’s financial self-interest at play here? Kara Swisher, the journalist and podcast host, said at a Status event that while Bartiromo may have been “a legal sinkhole,” it was also true “that a lot of these companies, you can start to see, are making ready for the change, for possible political change.” The Democratic Party is likely to regain control of one or both houses of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Bartiromo’s departure also comes as conversations are beginning to grow around a post-Trump Republican Party, and as news organizations ramp up coverage of who will next wear the MAGA crown. Much was made of JD Vance’s speech on Thursday to the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention, which the Times, Washington Post, and Guardian framed as a pitch to become the next leader of the MAGA faithful. Whomever the movement turns to after Trump, they are unlikely to share the president’s obsession with the results of the 2020 race. Viewed in this light, Fox’s dismissal of Bartiromo could be interpreted as the network knocking down potential hurdles to its post-Trump future.

As Fox News inches away from appeasement of the White House, CBS News appears to be hewing closer to the administration’s line. Last night, the network aired its first episode of a revamped 60 Minutes following the firings of hosts and producers who had clashed with Bari Weiss, CBS News’s editor in chief, and Nick Bilton, the show’s new executive producer. (Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi, formerly of 60 Minutes, have joined the Columbia Journalism School as journalists in residence and will contribute to CJR.) Sunday’s episode reported on the Hollywood-friendly tale of a downed US airman that I wrote about in April. According to CNN’s Zachary Cohen and Brian Stelter, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “played an unusually hands-on role” in planning for the 60 Minutes interview with the airman, who went by the call sign Dude 44 Bravo. (A Pentagon spokesperson told CNN its reporting was “a complete lie.”) The result was a segment that looked like an ad for the US military. “So in order to get out one, there were close to a hundred other service members involved in risking their lives on the ground?” Norah O’Donnell asked Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at one point. “Norah,” he replied, “what I think you need to know is, we would have sent more.”

As for Bartiromo, her contract terms mean she cannot simply walk into another network. Nor can she follow Carlson and other right-wing media figures in making her own content on YouTube or elsewhere, at least if she wants to retain her salary, a deal that Navarro called a “Golden Muzzle.” Online theorizing that Bartiromo might be tapped to fill the vacant White House press secretary role quickly evaporated. There was some speculation about Bartiromo heading to CBS News, stemming from a gossip column published on Substack called Naughty but Nice that claimed she had met with Weiss. But a source at CBS News familiar with the matter told me that the rumors were completely baseless. 

A deeper question is whether it matters for Trump’s MAGA base that Bartiromo is no longer on Fox News selling his message. Since taking office, the Trump administration has tried to force outlets to bend the knee through threats, lawsuits, and regulatory pressure. In some cases these efforts appear to be working; Pelley, a longtime correspondent at 60 Minutes, alleged that Weiss “was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration.” At the same time, the administration has thrown open the doors of White House briefings, party events, and (for a time) the Pentagon press room to sycophantic influencers and alternative outlets such as NewsNation and One America News Network. Navarro suggested in his Washington Times op-ed that Fox News viewers unhappy with the loss of Bartiromo could tune in to Newsmax or Real America’s Voice instead, and, in language that revealed how White House officials think of the network, urged Suzanne Scott, Fox’s CEO, to “prostrate before Mr. Trump for disrespecting the office and to Trump Nation for suppressing MAGA news.” 

But even if Fox News is not the only planet in the MAGA universe, the network still has a gravitational force in American politics. According to Nielsen data, Fox News had an average weekday primetime viewership of more than 2.6 million in June, topping NBC’s 2.4 million and CBS’s 2 million, and dwarfing NewsNation, which had a primetime average of just 130,000 for the same month. Given his reverence for ratings, this may be why Trump made clear his displeasure at Fox’s ouster of Bartiromo. “Maria is a total professional, and a true warrior. Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy,” he posted on Truth Social. “God bless you, Maria!”

Other Notable Stories … 
By Jem Bartholomew

• On Thursday, McClatchy, the national chain that owns about thirty newspapers including the Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee, announced deep job cuts across the company, which will directly affect more than ninety people. According to the New York Times, more than a third of the editorial staff at the Herald and almost the entire staff at the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, its sister paper, were laid off. Carol Marbin Miller, deputy investigations editor at the Herald, told the Times that the cuts were “a bloodbath.” Betsy Morais, CJR’s editor in chief, wrote in her note to members on Saturday that this round of layoffs “felt especially grim. Perhaps that was because of the sheer number, or the impact on esteemed newsrooms, or a sense that the weight of AI is sinking us all.”

• On Wednesday last week, NOTUS, the news outlet launched in 2024 by Robert Allbritton, a cofounder of Politico, became the Washington Sun. The name change comes after NOTUS was blocked by a federal judge in June from rebranding itself the Washington Star. In May, Adam Piore reported for CJR on the organization—and the gap left by the decline of regional newspapers that it intends to fill. The outlet explained its new name in a press release: “Why The Sun? You can choose your metaphor: We’re shining a light on Washington. Everything is clearer in daylight. We’d rather light a big candle than keep on cursing the darkness.”

• Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who now broadcasts independently on YouTube, announced that he is launching the Don Lemon Channel in partnership with Swerve TV, an operator and distributor of “FAST” (free ad-supported streaming television) channels. The new channel will be “available across streaming and linear platforms,” Variety reports. Lemon’s visibility has risen since January, when he was arrested for his critical reporting on Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. Lemon is now facing criminal civil rights charges, which he has sought to have dismissed on the grounds of “vindictive prosecution.” The Don Lemon Channel is built “on the idea that people want the truth delivered straight without a corporate boss deciding what makes air,” Lemon said in a statement.

• Erik Slavin, the former editor in chief of Stars and Stripes who was fired by the Pentagon last month after speaking out against editorial interference from the Defense Department, published a piece in The Atlantic last week about his dismissal. “The Pentagon has articulated a remarkably narrow view of press freedom,” he writes. For more on the pressure exerted on Stars and Stripes, see Ivan L. Nagy’s reporting for CJR.

• On Thursday, Judge John Hinderaker, of the US District Court for the District of Arizona, sentenced a man to five years’ probation for making hoax ransom demands to the family of Nancy Guthrie—the mother of Savannah Guthrie, a host of NBC’s Today show—who disappeared on January 31 in a suspected abduction case. Derrick Callella, forty-two, who had no connection to a separate ransom note sent to media outlets following Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, pleaded guilty to two counts of telephonic harassment, attributing his actions to methamphetamine addiction. In June, it was made public that investigators received a note, in the days immediately after her disappearance, that claimed to be from Nancy Guthrie’s kidnappers and said she had died; police investigations are ongoing.

• And W, the fashion and culture outlet established in 1972, will release the first issue of WYouth (pronounced “double youth”), a print magazine aimed at teenagers, on Tuesday. In June, Noëlle de Leeuw reported for CJR on the print renaissance for teen readers, which also includes Cuqui (pronounced “cookie”), a publication founded by Paula James-Martinez, the former fashion director of Refinery29. Ava Nirui, WYouth’s editor, told the New York Times that “kids are yearning for pre-internet times,” adding that they “want something that they can pull out of their bag and share and enjoy with their friends.”

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