The Lara Loganization of Maria Bartiromo
The long, sad journey of two talented newswomen from respect to ignominy and irrelevance.
You must suffer me to go my own dark way. ~ Dr. Jekyll
The New York Times’s Ross Douthat got my mind spinning the other day over 19th century Gothic English literature — stay with me here a moment. I’ll get to Maria Bartiromo presently.
Ross, commenting on the erosion of the humanities in higher education, confessed to being a “Harvard-educated newspaper columnist and self-styled cultural conservative who regularly unburdens himself of deep thoughts on pop TV but hasn’t read a complete 19th-century novel for his own private enjoyment in — well, let’s just say it’s been a while.”
A panic attack started kicking in. Was I a similarly Ivy-educated writer who occasionally appears on broadcast media to convey deep thoughts but who hasn’t read a Victorian-era masterpiece in “a while”? (clutching pearls) Just another hypocritical avatar of Western civilization’s destruction?
Humbug!
I’ve been flipping through Robert Louis Stevenson’s eternal blockbuster, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Much more than a mere horror story, Stevenson’s classic masterfully explores the duality of human nature, the inner struggle between good and evil. While the good Dr. Jekyll is the rational ego, bound by societal norms and rectitude, the savage Mr. Hyde is all unconstrained primal urges and instant gratification.
Which got me thinking about Fox poohbahs in the wake of the Dominion lawsuit revelations. First, the hypocrisy is colossal. Examples:
While extolling Donald Trump with North Korean-gauge hosannas on the air, behind the scenes, Tucker Carlson was trash-talking him:
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”
“I hate him passionately.”
Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer.”
While publicly, Fox figures were propagating Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, behind the scenes, or under oath, they were saying just the opposite.
Laura Ingraham:
“Do you believe that Dominion was involved in an effort to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump?” a Dominion lawyer asked.
“I don’t have any basis to believe that.”
Rupert Murdoch:
“You’ve never believed that Dominion was involved in an effort to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump, correct?” a Dominion lawyer asked.
“I’m open to persuasion; but, no, I’ve never seen it,” Murdoch replied.
Asked whether he agreed that Fox “endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election,” he replied that it was “not Fox,” but some of its reporters “as commentators” and then proceeded to name all of Fox’s star anchors.
Sean Hannity:
Hannity said of Sydney Powell’s election fraud claims that he “did not believe it for one second.” But repeatedly insisted to his viewers that “it will be impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results, that’s a fact.”
I’ve long been fascinated by highly educated, intelligent people who readily sell their souls, flush integrity down the toilet and blather all sorts of lies and nonsense in return for fame and riches. I wrote a two-part “Don’t Feed the Whores” essay on such sell-outs. In “Why Have So Many Really Smart Journalists Sold Their Souls to Trump?” I wondered, “Don’t these otherwise highly intelligent professionals worry about their legacy? That they’ll be lumped in the same sorry menagerie as Father Coughlin, Axis Sally, Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose?” In fact, in another recent piece, I compare Tucker Carlson to the World War II broadcast traitors.
As the evidence shows, people like Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham know better. They glibly spout Medieval-caliber superstitions and conspiracies on air while snickering about their rube audience in private or under oath. They’re really therefore nothing more than intellectual whores.
The truly scary ones, however, are the deluded True Believers, the ones who buy into the lies like some dazed Kool-Aid-addled cult captives. Zombie-like, they don’t so much as sell themselves out as succumb to their inner Mr. Hyde.
Maria Bartiromo is one such creature.
Bartiromo, 55, distinguished herself as a highly respected financial journalist for over 20 years at CNBC. Then she joined Fox News in 2013 for an annual salary of $5 million. Gradually, she slid into the fever swamps of the Dark Side, echoing Trumpist claptrap and QAnonish batshit.
In a profile of Bartiromo two years ago, The Washington Post related how the ex-CNBC star went from a highly respected groundbreaking business journalist to an undead-shill for Donald Trump. Her interview with him at that time comprised wiffle ball pitches, allowing an uninterrupted Trump soliloquy of self-serving falsehoods, followed by her own confirming atta-boys. “What happened to Maria Bartiromo?” asked the writer.
With the 2020 elections results in, Bartiromo texted Steve Banner, “I want to see massive fraud exposed. Will (Trump) be able to turn this around. I told my team we’re not allowed to say pres elect. Not in scripts. Not in banners on air. Until this moves through the courts.”
“Then they (Democrats) did dumps,” she continued. “Big massive dumps, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over.” She bought into the twice-impeached president’s evidence-free claims of fraud. “This is disgusting,” she said, “and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted.”
A Fox senior vice president warned that Bartiromo “has GOP conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes.”
Call it the Lara Loganization of Maria Bartiromo.
Logan, of course, was the sultry yet accomplished “60 Minutes” correspondent who descended into madness, a sullied fallen angel forsaken not only by the gods of mainstream media, but also by the bilge spewers of the neo-fascist fringe.
Fox dumped her last year after she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
She then slithered to the far-right cable TV organ, Newsmax. But even they couldn’t stomach her, booting her after she went on a bizarre rant alleging that world leaders “dine on the blood of children.”
“What happened to Lara Logan?” echoes in headlines and corporate news offices — until she fast recedes into the footnotedom reserved for erstwhile stars who just lost it.
Now we’re seeing headlines: “What happened to Maria Bartiromo?” She, too, risks sliding into irrelevance, a scorned, raving millionaire bag lady just like her “60 Minutes” counterpart.
What distinguishes the Bartiromo’s and Logan’s from the Carlson’s and Hannity’s is that the latter are accomplished liars with their sanity intact, while the former have lost their marbles.
As they transitioned from MSM to the fantasy Fox-verse of Goebbels-speak, the tethers of civilized demeanor and rational thought gradually fell away, like the grey cells in a demented brain. Like Mr. Hyde, they gave into the seductive miasma of primal urges and instant gratification. MAGA. Soros. The Steal. Deep State. They take it all in, the intoxicants that empower and enrich.
Dr. Jekyll has their number:
“I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life... I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.”