Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo is supposed to be an objective journalist and anchor. But she was so eager to believe – and then retweet - a claim that Hillary Clinton had referred to a Muslim as a “sand n****r” that Bartiromo couldn’t be bothered to check whether it was true.
Yesterday, Bartiromo retweeted this tweet from Joyce A. Plattner who retweeted it from Josh Cornett. Both are obvious Trump supporters. Both thought they had a big scoop from Wikileaks showing that Clinton referred to a Muslim as a “sand ni****r.” Bartiromo retweeted both. Maybe their politics is why Bartiromo thought they’d be so credible. Or maybe the smear was just too irresistible to fact check. But here’s what she sent out to her 205,000 followers:
You’ll note that the above is a screen grab because it turns out the tweets are 100% wrong and Bartiromo later deleted them. Had she bothered to read the actual email before retweeting it, she would never have tweeted the smear in the first place. At least, we hope not.
Even a cursory reading of the actual leaked email makes it clear that a) Clinton did not use the term, the author of a piece in Israel’s Haaretz did, as per a translation; b) that the piece used the term as a suggestion of what went through the mind of an Israeli police officer whose brutality resulted in the death of a Palestinian “illegal alien” in Israel; c) the intent of the Haaretz piece was to move readers in sympathy with the dead Palestinian; and c) Hillary Clinton found the piece meaningful enough that she wanted to share it.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple explained why Bartiromo’s careless retweet matters:
The slime here couldn’t possibly be more complete. Instead of having used an epithet against a group of people, Clinton was expressing her interest in knowing more about the social, political and criminal dimensions of an important story affecting Israelis and Palestinians. Some unknown number of Bartiromo’s 200,000-plus Twitter followers came away with the slanderous impression. From what we know about Fox News and Fox Business, she’ll suffer no discipline for the retweets; few will write about it. But the episode is instructive, because bit by bit, this is how the country becomes ungovernable.
Bartiromo has since deleted her tweets. But rather than apologize, she tweeted this as a reply to Wemple's article:
@washingtonpost @ErikWemple not a smear traffic at all. I realized the retweet was wrong soonafter and deleted ASAP tensions high
— Maria Bartiromo (@MariaBartiromo) October 10, 2016
And then she blocked him.
Bartiromo has a history of promoting Donald Trump and/or bashing Democrats on Twitter.
Watch Bartiromo laugh as Trump tells her he's going to "keep the suspense going" on whether he thinks President Obama was born in the United States, from the September 16, 2016 Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, via Media Matters.