Maria Bartiromo isn’t budging.
Unlike well-known journalists like Megyn Kelly, Lara Logan, Glenn Greenwald, Sharyl Attkisson, Trish Regan and others who’ve either been fired from their jobs, or quit in disgust, for not toeing the mainstream line, Bartiromo sits securely atop her big perch at Fox Business. She’s still firing salvos about Russiagate being a hoax and possible voter fraud in the election — and angrily calling out censorship on social media.
Just don’t call her a conspiracy theorist.
Bartiromo says that people who began smearing her after the 2016 election for being pro-Trump or “right wing” have it all wrong. She said she’s voted both Democrat and Republican over the years. Don’t even mention a 2018 headline that read “Maria Bartiromo’s Strange Trip from Money Honey to One of Trump’s Top Boosters” or she will erupt.
“It’s not about Trump, it’s about fairness,” Bartiromo said during an interview on Zoom Friday morning from home, where she’d just finished anchoring her three-hour “Mornings with Maria” show.
“I’m a proud American and this is still the greatest country in the world. But the business of being innocent until proven guilty goes out the window these days. It’s like oh, forget that, it’s Trump.”
As someone used to speaking her mind, she was furious at being flagged by Twitter for some pre-election tweets. So she announced Nov. 6 she was switching to the new social media app, Parler. She amassed more than 1 million followers in just a few days and last week helped make Parler, billed as a non-biased, free speech-driven platform, the No. 1 free downloaded app. Many so-called “conservative” journalists and pundits who have been censored or banished from Twitter or Facebook are now on Parler.
“I’m not going to sit around and get censored by some faceless 20-somethings who don’t like something I say,” Bartiromo told the Post. “I consider all of that election interference.”
Bartiromo was still using Twitter as of last week but said she will be “dropping scoops” on Parler more than Twitter. Parler, which began in 2018, has roughly 8 million users and is still dwarfed by Twitter, with 187 million daily active users and Facebook which has 1.8 billion daily users.
“Mornings with Maria” is one of 17 hours of television Bartiromo, 53, does per week. She still rises at 3 a.m. every day to get ready for her 6 a.m. show, a grueling schedule that goes back more than 25 years. She comes across as focused and tenacious, with enough Brooklyn in her (she was born and raised in Bay Ridge) that you wouldn’t want to cross her.
She said she believes Trump was the victim of an attempted coup that began even before his election, based on what she said was careful study of documents and other information provided to her by members of Congress and government officials. She also said she believes the Democrats may have committed voter fraud and says the courts, not the media, should decide who won the 2020 presidential race.
“I spent 20 years at CNBC and five years at CNN,” said Bartiromo, who joined Fox Business in 2014. “I never really studied politics and policy. I didn’t know how Washington worked. I knew there were dirty tricks but I didn’t know the extent of it until I learned what they were doing to Trump. I was so shocked and outraged that this kind of behavior actually goes on, that you can come up with a story about the president colluding with Russia and weaponize the intelligence agencies of the US government. I was just not buying the collusion story. That was the line everyone had to get behind and I wouldn’t.”
The second chapter of her latest book, “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival,” which came out last month, is even titled “The Coup that Failed,” in reference to Trump.
To hear her, Bartiromo’s the same tough “truth seeker” who held off misogynistic male traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when she began reporting there in 1995 — and she won’t be cowed by the powerful today any more than she was when she was in her 20s.
“It’s not about politics with her,” former NYSE chairman Richard Grasso, who greenlit Bartiromo’s CNBC debut at the NYSE, told the Post. “It’s about what she thinks is right and what she thinks is the truth. She calls them like she sees them. She always has.”
Said one insider: “She had to have sharp elbows to get where she is today. She got a lot of grief from men who didn’t want her around but she didn’t let that stop her. After going through that she’s hardly going to be afraid of the Twitter mob.”