“Looks like we’ve been punked,” said Fox Business presenter Maria Bartiromo, after the latest airborne accident that hit the conservative network.
In a segment broadcast on Wednesday night, Bartiromo appeared to believe she was interviewing Dennis Organ, president and CEO of pork-producing giant Smithfield Foods. She even interviewed Matt Johnson of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere.
The six-minute interview began when Bartiromo asked about a Covid-19 outbreak at a Smithfield plant, South Dakota, and the company’s plans for vaccine distribution. Johnson responded by speaking of “dedicated and resilient” workforce and the company’s commitment to provide employees with “comprehensive personal protective equipment.”
But soon the scope of the meeting changed, as Johnson personally promised[d] that we are going to do better, and the first change under my leadership is transparency and sometimes brutal honesty ”.
With that, he launched a rant about the food industry and how it could contribute to a new pandemic. Farms were “petri dishes” for infectious diseases, he said, and he lapsed into meaningful grins and pauses before Bartiromo pulled the plug on the interview.
In response to a request for comment, a Fox News spokeswoman pointed to Bartiromo’s on-air correction.
“We would like to apologize to Dennis Organ, Smithfield Foods and to our audience for making this mistake,” said Bartiromo. “We will of course be more vigilant.”
Keira Lombardo, Smithfield’s Chief Administrative Officer, said in a statement, “A simple Google search for a photo of our CEO would have prevented this. This allowed false information to be broadcast, and Fox has apologized for this complete decline. “
Johnson told the Wrap that he was not “too guilty of a conscience” about the stunt, which he said was inspired in part by a recent fact-checking on voting fraud claims and involved “fake email addresses and fake pitch phone numbers.”
Critics from Fox News and Fox Business pointed out that this is by no means Bartiromo’s first encounter with false information, and refers to more than just the fact-checking in the air of claims about Smartmatic, a voting machine company.
Bartiromo landed an interview with Donald Trump in November, his first after his election defeat to Joe Biden. In that meeting, the host referred to Trump’s baseless claims “many times that these elections were faked, that there was a lot of fraud and the facts are on your side,” then backed the president.
“Then they did landfills,” she said, referring to claims that Democrats were flooding states with fraudulent votes, “big mass dumps, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and everywhere. This is disgusting and we cannot allow the US election to be corrupted. “
The host later said that an unidentified “source of information” told me that President Trump did indeed win the election. ”In fact, her own network, like others, called the election for Biden and election officials from the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security said there was no fraud.
Bartiromo “used to be the Larry King of the corporate world,” Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, told the Washington Post. “But I think she’s seen the ratings of people like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and even Lou Dobbs, and she saw that the way to survive at Fox is to go all-in for Donald Trump.”
Bartiromo has retained access to the president and interviewed him because other reporters have been sidelined. She told the Post: “Ever since I started defeating President Trump and defeating the coup and the attempt to bring him down, I became the enemy of the media and the activists and the gangs. I have a head start. I mean I stick to my guns and I don’t get blown away easily. “
In a previous role as a reporter for CNBC during the dot.com boom, Bartiromo rose to cult status and became known by some as the “Money Honey” or even the “Sophia Loren of financial journalism”. Her admirers then included Joey Ramone, the lead singer of the Ramones, who began contacting her for stock tips.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2006, Bartiromo said, “I started getting emails from him and he would say, ‘Maria, what do you think of Intel or what do you think of AOL?’ and I thought, “Who is this person sending me an email? It’s crazy, he calls himself Joey Ramone.”
Sure enough, it was him and we developed this friendship. And it was tailored to the markets. He really understood his own investment portfolio. Joey Ramone was a fantastic investor. “
The frontman, who died in 2001, later contacted Bartiromo to say he had written a song about her and invited her to CBGB to hear it. Bartiromo didn’t come to the gig – she had to be up by 6am – but she sent a camera crew.
“Sure, the cameraman came back with the tape and there he and his band are with this song Maria Bartiromo and I just love it. It’s a great tribute. I just love that. It’s great, just great. “
The song appeared on Ramone’s latest album.