Trump adviser accuses Fox News of muzzling MAGA after Maria Bartiromo ouster
By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — Fox News is “suppressing MAGA news” and enforcing a “shadow ban” of some of President Donald Trump’s surrogates, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro charged in an audacious op-ed on Tuesday.
Navarro also defended Maria Bartiromo, the longtime Fox host and Trump friend the network ousted last week. And he addressed his role in the Bartiromo dust-up.
Tuesday’s op-ed is part of a deepening dispute between Fox News and the Trump White House over coverage of Trump’s election fraud claims.
The drama dates back to mid-July, when the president delivered a prime-time speech and made many claims about election vulnerabilities, including supposed interference by China.
Fox News showed the speech live — unlike some other networks — but didn’t dwell on Trump’s conspiratorial narrative. “Fox & Friends,” often dubbed the president’s favorite show, didn’t mention it at all the next day.
Bartiromo, it turns out, wanted to follow up. She booked Navarro for her Fox Business Network morning show.
However, Navarro wrote, “Hours later, she told me Fox had clamped down on any coverage and forwarded the text that had gone to her producers.”
Navarro published the internal guidance, which he said was sent by Fox Business executive Ralph Giordano. It said: “Hi – We don’t want to promote it or push to the speech at all. We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.”
Giordano evidently didn’t say why “we” wanted to avoid the subject, but one logical explanation is legal exposure. Trump’s 2020 election lies were promoted on several Fox News shows, including Bartiromo’s, and led to numerous defamation lawsuits.
The best-known suit, filed by Dominion Voting Systems, was settled on the eve of trial in 2023 for a jaw-dropping $787.5 million. A similar suit filed by Smartmatic is still pending.
So, with those defamation-related dangers in mind, Fox has shown uncharacteristic caution at times when Trump has revisited his 2020 election lies.
And that has created a bit of a wedge between the network and the president, one that Navarro highlighted in Tuesday’s op-ed.
He singled out Fox News Media’s CEO, stating, “I don’t know whether Suzanne Scott is a Trump-hating RINO. I do know her business model is.”
Navarro asserted that Fox’s biggest advertisers “despise key MAGA issues,” so the network is careful about its topic selection: “Scott feeds the audience conservative red meat — Democrat socialists, biological men in women’s sports, illegal alien rapists and murderers — but keeps it inside guardrails that wall off MAGA themes such as election integrity, Big Pharma and benefits of the Trump tariffs.”
Tuesday’s op-ed praised Bartiromo at length, suggesting that Navarro might be going to bat for a friend.
Bartiromo was taken off the air after Fox management learned that she had shared the mid-July internal guidance with the White House.
Navarro confirmed in his op-ed that “Scott got an angry call from the West Wing” about the directive not to cover Trump’s election claims.
He said it was his “duty” to pass along Bartiromo’s text to White House colleagues.
Bartiromo was quietly benched at first, but her exit was made public last week, leading the president to express shock on Truth Social.
“Maria is a total professional, and a true warrior,” he wrote. “Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy. God bless you, Maria!”
Trump sometimes portrays Fox as an adversary too, despite the network’s day-in-day-out promotion of his presidency and his agenda. His usual complaint is that the network isn’t sycophantic enough.
A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The-CNN-Wire
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