Maria Bartiromo is recognized by viewers of the Fox Business Network for hosting her weekday show,
but there's so much more to this well-known news
anchor. Here are some things you may not know about Maria Bartiromo.
In 1988, Bartiromo landed her dream job
as an assignment editor at CNN. She spent the next five years there,
according to a profile in Parade, and she loved it. During that time, she told Business Insider,
"I didn't have any interest in going on the air. I didn't even want to go on the air."
Ironically, a promotion to producer took her out of the field and parked her behind a desk,
a move that ultimately propelled her to move to the other side of the camera.
She admitted that she, quote, "knew [she] needed to make a change."
That change came in 1993 when she was hired by CNBC as an on-air personality at the financial
news cable network. She told Parade that when she made the decision, her colleague Lou Dobbs
warned her that leaving CNN, quote, "would be the greatest mistake [she] ever made."
Dobbs was way off. As The New York Times reported, Bartiromo's career exploded during her years
at CNBC, earning her the nickname "the Money Honey." CNBC exec Bruno Cohen told the outlet,
"[Bartiromo had] crossed over and become a bit of a pop culture celebrity."
"When women feel like they have support, they actually do feel like they can do anything."
While at CNBC, Bartiromo lent her voice to New York City's famed Grand Central
Station by recording a series of safety messages for passengers,
which repeated at 15-minute intervals for close to a month back in 2008.
According to The New York Times, opinions about her public-safety announcements were divided.
One Connecticut commuter couldn't remember the content of her message, but said,
"Her voice resonates so nicely. [...] [It was] something to do with not leaving packages behind?"
Other commuters, however, were not as enamored. One person called her, quote,
"really loud [and] kind of jarring," while another found Bartiromo's message to be, quote,
"almost like subliminal advertising for her."
Occasionally some of those commuters just happened to be Bartiromo's friends.
When passing through the station and hearing her voice, they'd fire off an email to let her
know they had just heard her voice. She told the Times that she would respond by saying,
"You can't get away from me."
In 2007, Bartiromo was at the peak of her "Money Honey" fame when she became embroiled
in controversy. That February, The New York Times reported about questions that arose
after Bartiromo accompanied Todd S. Thomson — who was at the time the chief executive of
Citigroup's wealth management division — on a lavish trip to Napa to, quote,
"road test some of the hottest luxury cars on the market." She had also flown with Thomson to
China on Citigroup's corporate jet, where they attended various "bank-sponsored functions."
Just weeks before the Times piece was published,
Forbes reported that Thomson had been terminated by Citigroup chairman Charles Prince due to,
quote, "excessive spending" — or at least that was the official explanation.
The Financial Times offered another, reporting that the firing occurred because:
"[Prince] had been concerned about the way Mr. Thomson had
managed his friendship [with Bartiromo]."
Despite the implications of impropriety,
Bartiromo batted away rumors. She told The New York Times later that year,
"Something happened between Todd Thomson and Chuck Prince,
and somehow I got wrapped up in it. Clearly, there was another agenda going on."
As gossip swirled about an affair between Bartiromo and Todd Thomson,
he was asked to address that rumor by Reuters. He balked, insisting it was,
quote, "an inappropriate question." He said,
"I've never been accused of having anything other than an appropriate
relationship with Bartiromo. And I do have an appropriate relationship with Bartiromo."
With the rumors denied, the controversy eventually died down — for a while. In 2013,
Page Six reported that Thomson and his wife of 25 years were going through a "bitter divorce."
During the course of their conscious uncoupling, Thomson's future ex-wife
wanted permission to depose Bartiromo — who was married to financier Jonathan Steinberg.
A Connecticut court granted that request, agreeing that, quote,
"certain facts [...] are within the knowledge or power of [Bartiromo]."
The gambit apparently worked; the divorce was settled before Bartiromo was required
to sit for a deposition. As of early 2021, Bartiromo and Steinberg are still married.
By the early 2010s, Bartiromo was at the top of her game. However,
there was a new player on the field, Fox Business News. As the Daily News reported in 2012,
this rival financial news network had been sucking ratings from CNBC,
with network execs reportedly "freaking out" as viewership plummeted. In 2013,
Bartiromo announced she was leaving her TV home of 20 years for a new gig at Fox Business.
As The New York Times reported,
CNBC issued a statement addressing its star anchor's departure, saying,
"After 20 years of groundbreaking work at CNBC, Bartiromo will be leaving the company
as her contract expires on November 24th. Her contributions to CNBC are too numerous
to list but we thank her for all of her hard work over the years and wish her the best."
While ratings were down, the Times pointed out that CNBC was still attracting more than
three times as many viewers as Fox Business in the key demographics. But that changed
after Bartiromo's arrival; by 2018, she was regularly beating her old CNBC show, Squawk Box,
and in October 2020, Mornings with Maria marked "its highest-rated month ever in total viewers."
There's no denying that Bartiromo has experienced some massive success
through her career as a television anchor. That success, she revealed in an interview
with Dujour, didn't just occur randomly. Detailing the philosophy behind a tireless
work ethic that has contributed to her decades-long media career, she explained,
"One of my secrets to success is simple: I work really hard. I know there are no shortcuts,
and I've carried out my career in that way. There are a lot of people who can
get in front of a camera and be articulate. But you really need to know your stuff.
And you need to own it [...] so that nobody can push you around."
She elaborated on her success for Success magazine, saying,
"Success is knowing yourself — an inner comfort and inner contentment."
Asked if she possessed those particular attributes, she simply said, "I do."
"You always want to work hard and recognize that there are no shortcuts."
Once she was at Fox Business, the financial sister channel to conservative-leaning Fox News,
Bartiromo quickly assimilated into her new surroundings. As she settled in,
Baritromo came to become one of the leading TV cheerleaders for President Donald Trump.
Her former colleagues from CNBC were pretty much baffled by the
puzzling 180-degree turn from apolitical financial journalist to right-wing pundit.
One of her past CNBC colleagues told The Los Angeles Times,
"There is a lot of eye-rolling. Maria was always considered to be a principled professional.
She's losing a lot of respect from her fellow journalists."
Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Bartiromo
addressed allegations she had abandoned her journalistic ethics. She explained,
"I've certainly broadened my portfolio in terms of who I'm
speaking to and what I'm covering. Have I become more conservative?
No. I've always been pretty straight down the middle in terms of my personal beliefs."
Once the dust settled from the contentious US presidential election of 2020,
all the US television networks had called it:
former Vice President Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States.
Despite losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College,
President Donald Trump asserted that the election was "rigged," claiming
he had actually won in a landslide but that the election was somehow "a fraud."
"If you count the legal votes, I easily win."
Once the mainstream media had declared Biden the victor, Trump was interviewed on Bartiromo's show,
for an appearance that immediately became infamous for her softball questions
and refusal to demand Trump prove any of his demonstrably false claims.
As USA Today noted, Bartiromo was "slammed" by fellow journalists for essentially providing
a platform for the president's baseless gaslighting. CNN's Amanda Carpenter tweeted,
"Let's be clear. 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 the weeks after the 2020 presidential election,
viewers of Bartiromo's Fox Business Network show watched her regularly discuss a company
called Dominion Voting Systems. She and her guests claimed Dominion's software was set
up to switch votes for Donald Trump to Joe Biden, effectively rigging the election.
Those claims were false, and resulted in Dominion's lawyers sending a letter to the network
and its hosts addressing, quote, "patently false accusations" and a "smear campaign against the
company," according to Business Insider. A similar letter, from another voting machine company,
Smartmatic, led Bartiromo and other Fox News and Fox Business hosts to air a pre-taped segment
debunking the various claims of election fraud they'd been making on their shows.
Broadcast journalism has been very good to Bartiromo — and that also applies to
her bank account. The Fox Business anchor has socked away an estimated $50 million.
According to The Street, Bartiromo is one of television's 10 highest-paid news anchors,
with an annual salary of $10 million. In addition to her Fox Business salary,
Bartiromo has some other revenue streams funneling cash into her account.
One of these is her sideline as a writer — she's written several books, including Use The News:
How To Separate the Noise from the Investment Nuggets and Make Money in Any Economy, The 10
Laws of Enduring Success, and The Cost: Trump, China, and American Revival, published in 2020.
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