The cogs are beginning to pop off President Donald Trump's massive MAGA media machine, a columnist argued Saturday.
Maria Bartiromo's sudden and shocking departure from Fox News this week revealed a fatal flaw with Trump's hold on journalists-turned-pundits who parrot his talking points, wrote Salon's Sophia Tesfeye.
"Machines break down," wrote Tesfeye. "The Bartiromo break up shows where Fox’s loyalty actually ends."
The details of that break up remain in dispute.
While news outlets Status, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported Bartiromo was fired for sharing internal information with the White House about Fox management's guidance on covering Trump's election claims, her lawyer asserts this is "absolutely and unequivocally false."
Tesfeye on Saturday argued that while questions about specifics remain, the larger problem is reported fact.
"The network didn’t fire her for lying." she wrote. "It fired her for leaking."
The Salon writer noted Bartiromo's alignment with Trump might have surprised fans who began to follow her career at CNBC, where she spent two decades as a respected financial journalist.
"Bartiromo had stature, and a generation of young women moving into financial journalism looked up to her," wrote Tesfeye. "Then came Trump."
The financial journalist's transition to Fox saw Bartiromo grow increasingly uncritical of the commander in chief, Tesfeye said.
Bartiromo became a prominent supporter of Trump's claim that the 2020 election had been stolen and pushed the Dominion conspiracy theory that would ultimately cost Fox news $787 million, Tesfeye wrote.
"MAGA has a way of breaking people," she wrote. "Somewhere along the way, whether for love of Trump or for the money and access that loving him on television reliably generates, Bartiromo made a calculation to stop being a journalist and become something else entirely."
It was this transition that cost Bartiromo her job, Tesfeye argued, and this "breaking" that foretells trouble for Trump.
Fox News can easily swap in another pundit to replace Bartiromo, but it will no longer tolerate employees who put Trump's demands before the corporation's, she concluded.
"Fox may remain a propaganda network in most of the ways that matter," she wrote. "It is simply, for the moment, a propaganda network with shareholders, lawyers and executives who remember exactly what the last legal cliff cost them, and who are no longer willing to let one anchor’s loyalty to Trump outrun their own."