Fox News announced Thursday that it was parting ways with longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo, ending a run defined by her closeness to Donald Trump. The break, according to reporting on the decision, came after Bartiromo texted White House officials a copy of internal network guidance instructing hosts not to air Trump’s conspiratorial claims about the 2020 election and China during a prime-time speech in July — effectively tipping off the subject of the coverage to how the network was managing him.
Fox called it a violation of her employment agreement. It is also a small, specific window into how the network operates: there are internal instructions about which conspiracy theories not to amplify, and there is a public-facing product that ran with those same theories for years anyway. Bartiromo is currently a named defendant in two multibillion-dollar defamation suits over her role promoting Trump’s stolen-election claims after 2020. The rules a network writes for itself, and the ones its highest-rated hosts have already been sued for breaking, are evidently not the same rules.