It seems appropriate, to us at least, on the verge of the long Labor Day weekend, to take a moment and take stock of the events of the past week. And in particular, the events of the last few days and how they pertain to women in journalism.
Three things come immediately to mind, and while at first read they may not seem related, we think there may be, at the very least, a thread that runs through all of them.
And that thread deserves some recognition and appreciation.
The first item arrived this past Thursday afternoon, when reports began to emerge that Maria Bartiromo of Fox News (and its sister channel, Fox Business News) was out of her job at the Murdoch-family-owned networks. Bartiromo, who started in TV news as a producer at CNN, came to the public eye over a 20-year career at the business and finance-oriented network CNBC, which she joined in 1993. She became famous for both her anchoring and her appearance, but Bartiromo was no empty designer suit. She was the first reporter to ever go live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and she was known as a tough interviewer of business leaders of all stripes.
She left CNBC to join Fox News in 2014, and like many of the faces on the network, Bartiromo expressed more political views in her on-air appearances. She notably became a supporter of President Trump during his first term in office, and she was criticized for being a friendly and unchallenging interviewer of the 45th and now 47th President. Her statements after the 2020 presidential election made her a central figure in both the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits against Fox News; the Dominion case was settled for about $787 million, and the network was forced to air on-air acknowledgments that it broadcast false statements about Dominion’s voting systems. The latter lawsuit by Smartmatic is still pending in the courts.
The always reliable Status newsletter first reported last night that the events leading up to Bartiromo’s surprising defenstration from Fox News were centered around charges that she disobeyed directions from network management to “steer clear of giving credence to” claims made in a July primetime address by Mr. Trump, during which he made multiple unproven claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election and potential involvement from China. Bartiromo is also accused of going so far as to directly share with the White House the specific details of the network’s directive to her and other senior on-air figures to avoid any coverage of the debunked claims the President had presented.
This disclosure of confidential company information would have likely violated her employment agreement. It was apparently the final straw which led to her termination, likely with the direct approval of News Corporation founder Rupert Murdoch. Status speculates on what we immediately thought: whether Ms. Bartiromo might now be considered for the currently open position of White House Press Secretary.
Journalistic ethics were the focus of a second story on Thursday, when a report from The New York Times-owned sports website The Athletic was published. Andrew Marchand, the veteran sports media columnist, reported on the publication’s review of the work by its former NFL “Insider” Dianna Russini. Russini, as you may remember, resigned from The Athletic back in April, following a suspension that was triggered by the publication of a series of pictures by The New York Post’s “Page Six” that captured Russini and New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel together at an Arizona resort. The pictures called into question the relationship between the coach and the reporter, who had covered him and his teams for years.
The Athletic’s findings were that Russini was “noncompliant” with the editorial standards of the news organization, primarily because she never disclosed the relationship with Vrabel to her superiors at The Athletic. But the publication was specific in pointing out that it “neither completed an investigation nor reached any conclusion about the nature of the full relationship between Vrabel and Russini.”
Ultimately, The Athletic reviewed all of Dianna Russini’s work and decided to attach “editor’s notes” to a small number of Russini’s reporting, both in text and in videos, that specifically reference Vrabel in some fashion. For her part, the currently unemployed Russini issued only this statement for Marchand’s report: “I stand by any and all reporting I’ve ever done in my career.” (She was employed as an NFL reporter by ESPN from 2015 to 2023, before joining The Athletic in September of 2023.)
For his part, Mike Vrabel initially denied any inappropriate or personal relationship with Dianna Russini when the first photos were published. He later announced that he was entering counseling after a 2020 photo emerged showing the two kissing in a bar. The Athletic acknowledged that its review found that “Russini’s work was seldom reliant on Vrabel as a source or a subject.” It added: “But, of course, the appearances surrounding her relationship with Vrabel undermine our audience’s confidence in her impartiality.”
As of the time we are publishing this, Mike Vrabel continues as the head coach of the Patriots and says he is focused only on the start of the team’s regular season.
Our final item in this trio of stories about women in journalism concerns the passing of a figure who some would strongly suggest paved the way for the previous two to have their careers.
We learned on Thursday that journalist and activist Gloria Steinem passed away on September 2nd. To capture the full scope of her life and her leadership of the modern feminist movement would take many more paragraphs than we have available here. We would point you to the excellent summary of her life and achievements on Wikipedia and her obituary in The New York Times. (That’s a free link to their article.)
What we will offer—as men who came of age at the same time that Steinem rose as a leading voice in the fight for women’s rights and equality in society—is that she undoubtedly deserves her place in the small, but crucial group of journalists whose work, both on the printed page and in the industry itself, changed the course of the nation.
Her co-founding of Ms. magazine in 1971 sought to, as the Times put it so precisely, “capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.” In the clear light of reviewing the history of the five-and-a-half decades that followed, it is clear that she succeeded in many respects.
Though we would be quick to add that far too many aspects of our culture in this area still need to be acknowledged and addressed.
Amongst the best personal tributes to Gloria Steinem we’ve seen came from MS NOW anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who said on the network: “If it was not for Gloria Steinem, I would not be in this chair.”
We suspect that many women, not only in journalism, but in all walks of life, might echo those sentiments.
Hopefully, Maria Bartiromo and Dianna Russini are among them.
Gloria Steinem was 92 years old.
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