Maria Bartiromo (photo, left), who now works at Fox, made her name as a reporter for CNN Business News and CNBC (bio here).
She’s been at Fox since 2013, and became an unabashed cheerleader for Trump while he was president. Real journalists are expected to be impartial and at least maintain a facade of political neutrality.
In reality, reporters are like other people, they have opinions and vote for a party and candidates they personally support. That’s all well and good, as long as it doesn’t taint their journalistic objectivity while they’re working.
Bartiromo, assuming the role of a news reporter, conducted an on-air interview with Trump on Nov. 29, 2020. She messaged Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, that morning, “less than an hour before she was set to conduct Trump’s first interview since Election Day. The text included questions she planned to ask Trump,” CNN reported on Saturday, April 30, 2022 (see story here).
That violated journalism ethics, and any reputable news organization would fire any reporter who did that. It’s akin to a professor passing test questions to a student in advance of an exam. It compromises the integrity of the reporting.
But Bartiromo isn’t a journalist, and Fox isn’t a news organization. Wikipedia notes (here) that she was “an advocate for the Trump administration, giving him frequent unchallenging interviews and amplifying his conspiracy theories. Her Fox Business program was one of several programs that ran on-air corrections after pushing false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”
The CNN story also makes clear she was personally involved in helping Trump promote his false election conspiracy theories.
Bartiromo may once have been a reporter, but with her track record, she can never again be taken seriously as a journalist. She’s a Republican political operative. But if she insists on being called a journalist in the future, then the reply is she’s an unethical one.