Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo is being scorched on social media for not pushing back at Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen from him.
During the Sunday morning interview – the president’s first since losing the race to Joe Biden — Trump called the election “rigged” and a “fraud” in what journalist Yashar Ali called “practically a monologue,” as Bartiromo let him go on endlessly unchecked without mentioning the dozens of setbacks that his legal team has had in courts. Instead, Bartiromo echoed his outrage.
“This is disgusting and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted,” she said.
The interview was widely criticized across Twitter and on rival news networks. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Brian Stelter said, “This was not hardball. It wasn’t even softball. It was t-ball,” while the network’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy compared Bartiromo to Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“News organizations — and I think Fox claims to be one — have a responsibility,” Darcy said. “The president of the United States is trying to overturn the election. …Frankly, there is not much daylight between Maria and Alex Jones.”
Fellow CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter agreed saying on Twitter that “Maria Bartiromo is not interviewing the President right now. She is providing him a free platform to feed his base talking points uncontested. … This is propaganda.” In a tweet showing the interview, Vox’s Aaron Rupar said Bartiromo was “basically a North Korean news anchor now.”
Maria Bartiromo is basically a North Korean news anchor now pic.twitter.com/iDLwJOM1gk
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 29, 2020
President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election three weeks ago with a record 80 million votes nationwide and 306 electoral votes, the same amount that Trump earned in his 2016 election victory. Since then, Trump’s legal team has attempted in several swing states to prevent the election results from being certified, but has been consistently rebuffed. Most recently, Trump’s attempt to appeal a ruling rejecting certification of Pennsylvania’s election results was denied by an all-Republican appellate court board, while the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a lawsuit by Trump’s team attempting to declare mail-in ballots unconstitutional.
Despite this, Trump claimed without evidence that glitches in voting machines switched votes intended for him to Biden and that thousands of ballots were thrown out by election officials.
“This election was over and then they did dumps, they call them dumps, big massive dumps in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over,” he told Bartiromo. “If you take a look at you just take a look at just about every state that we’re talking about every swing state that we’re talking about, and they did these massive dumps of votes and all of a sudden, I went from winning by a lot to losing by a little, and in some cases, it took a period of time to do it.”
Criticism came in fast and furious for Bartiromo’s passivity. Here’s just a small sample:
That flush you hear is the last tiny bit of credibility Maria Bartiromo had left going the way of #AmericasBiggestLoser.
— KO 🇺🇦 #PrayersDontStopBullets 🟧 (@orgainkorgain) November 29, 2020
https://twitter.com/grahammessick/status/1333104636753014788
The best case scenario Re: this Maria Bartiromo interview is she just really thinks without Trump, the stock market is going to tank and doesn’t want to risk it no matter what, right? I generally try not to rag on journalists because I have to work with them but this seems… OTT
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) November 29, 2020
https://twitter.com/Marmel/status/1333078502615093250
Maria Bartiromo is basically a North Korean news anchor now pic.twitter.com/iDLwJOM1gk
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 29, 2020