Maria Is Gone, Here's What Else Has Changed At Fox News

Fox News has canceled Maria Bartiromo’s program, ending its relationship with one of cable news’s earliest defining stars and underscoring how the network has changed since the 2020 election.

The NYTimes reports the split matters most for Donald Trump. In 2020 he could count on hosts like Bartiromo to air his most extreme election-fraud claims on Fox’s highest-rated shows with little pushback. He cannot count on that now as he again argues the American election system is rife with fraud ahead of a midterm that polls suggest could be difficult for his party.

The caution is a direct result of the lawsuits that followed 2020. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two voting-technology companies at the center of stolen-election theories, sued Fox for $1.6 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively, alleging the network damaged their reputations. Fox paid $787.5 million to settle the Dominion case. Its litigation with Smartmatic continues, adding pressure to avoid promoting conspiracy theories in another election year.

Maria Bartiromo

Fox is a different network than it was in late 2020, both on camera and behind the scenes. Chief legal officer Viet Dinh, whose handling of the Dominion case drew scrutiny, is gone. So is his deputy Raj Shah, a former Trump aide who had helped keep the network tightly focused on right-wing criticism whenever Fox or its hosts were seen as insufficiently deferential to Trump’s fraud claims. 

Early in 2021 Fox ended Lou Dobbs’s program; he had been among the most enthusiastic promoters of the idea that the presidential election was rigged. After the Dominion settlement it parted ways with Tucker Carlson, who was mentioned in the case and had also drawn advertiser boycotts with his embrace of right-wing conspiracies. Jeanine Pirro, another figure in the two voting cases, now serves as Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Fox’s most popular hosts remain overwhelmingly loyal to Trump, including prime-time stars Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters. The network still tilts heavily in his favor and was alone among major news networks in airing his election-integrity speech in full. At the same time it has shown a willingness to break with the administration—for example on the military campaign in Iran, which some on-air hosts, including Ingraham, have criticized. Anchor Bret Baier also delivered a rare on-air defense of colleague Jonathan Hunt after Trump attacked Hunt’s Iran coverage.