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Maria Bartiromo, the one-time CNBC darling who parlayed her success in covering Wall Street to a job at Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, has heard the closing bell at the news organization.
“We thank Maria
for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter,” the company said in a statement Thursday.
Bartiromo’s last “Mornings with Maria” aired Thursday morning on Fox Business Network, and the show will be retitled “Morning with Fox Business” and employ a rotation of anchors. “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street,” which airs weekly on FBN Fridays, will become “FBN’s Wall Street” and will be hosted by Cheryl Casone this week and then rotating anchors following. Fox Business Network will launch a new daytime programming schedule in weeks to come.
Jason Chaffetz will host Bartiromo’s long-running Sunday show, “Sunday Morning Futures:” this week, and a new host will be announced at a later date.
The reasons for the split could not be immediately determined, but in past cases, Fox has parted ways with prominent anchors because they fell out of favor, as Tucker Carlson did in 2023; because of scandal, as was the case with Bill O’Reilly in 2017when he was accused of multiple examples of sexual harassment which he denied; or because the journalist was moving into politics, as happened with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who left behind weekend hosting duties on Fox News as he contemplated a run for the White House in 2015.
Bartiromo’s arrival at Fox in 2014 was meant to put other news organizations on notice that the company was serious about getting into deeper coverage of the financial markets. At the time, Baritromo said her intent was to have “dealmakers” on the show who werfe intimately involved with the headlines of the day. During an interview with Variety,she suggested that top executives were frustrated with news programs that had five or six people on the screen all talking at once, or business-news shows that place an emphasis on “sound bites” and “quick-buck type things.” The goal, she said, to make FBN more of a must-see for a specialized and knowledgeable audience. “We need more depth,” she said.
Since that time, however, Bartiromo has appeared to revel in politics, and some of her on-air remarks during Fox shows have spurred speculation about why a top-tier business journalist was going down rabbit holes and bringing up conspiracy theories. Bartiromo was one of a handful of Fox News personnel cited in materials tied a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Dominion Voting against Fox News in 2021. Fox ultimately agreed to settle the matter for a whopping $787.5 million. The allegations said Bartiromo had allowed false claims about the 2020 presidential election to air on the network as part of a bid to keep angry viewers from abandoning its programs.
More to come…
