Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo is being scorched on social media for not pushing back at Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen from him.
During the Sunday morning interview – the president’s first since losing the race to Joe Biden — Trump called the election “rigged” and a “fraud” in what journalist Yashar Ali called “practically a monologue,” as Bartiromo let him go on endlessly unchecked without mentioning the dozens of setbacks that his legal team has had in courts. Instead, Bartiromo echoed his outrage.
“This is disgusting and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted,” she said.
The interview was widely criticized across Twitter and on rival news networks. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Brian Stelter said, “This was not hardball. It wasn’t even softball. It was t-ball,” while the network’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy compared Bartiromo to Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“News organizations — and I think Fox claims to be one — have a responsibility,” Darcy said. “The president of the United States is trying to overturn the election. …Frankly, there is not much daylight between Maria and Alex Jones.”
Fellow CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter agreed saying on Twitter that “Maria Bartiromo is not interviewing the President right now. She is providing him a free platform to feed his base talking points uncontested. … This is propaganda.” In a tweet showing the interview, Vox’s Aaron Rupar said Bartiromo was “basically a North Korean news anchor now.”
President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election three weeks ago with a record 80 million votes nationwide and 306 electoral votes, the same amount that Trump earned in his 2016 election victory. Since then, Trump’s legal team has attempted in several swing states to prevent the election results from being certified, but has been consistently rebuffed. Most recently, Trump’s attempt to appeal a ruling rejecting certification of Pennsylvania’s election results was denied by an all-Republican appellate court board, while the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a lawsuit by Trump’s team attempting to declare mail-in ballots unconstitutional.
Despite this, Trump claimed without evidence that glitches in voting machines switched votes intended for him to Biden and that thousands of ballots were thrown out by election officials.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Wrap