Fox’s response to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo peddling thirdhand election fraud falsehoods she didn’t bother to check demonstrates how the network has abandoned anything resembling journalistic standards in its quest to return Donald Trump to the White House.

Bartiromo repeatedly told her Fox Business viewers this week about a “Democrat operation” to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote at Texas government offices, a story she originally attributed to the wife of a friend of a friend and made no apparent effort to verify. Her thirdhand gossip was swiftly debunked by the local Republican Party and the Texas Department of Public Safety, with a spokesperson for the latter noting that her conspiracy theory was “kind of racist.”

It should go without saying that at any credible news outlet, an anchor promoting wild claims they hadn’t verified that promptly dissolved like this would be facing disciplinary action for breaching standards. But Fox apparently doesn’t have standards barring its purported journalists from citing gossip they haven’t bothered to try to confirm on the air.

Zeteo News media columnist Justin Baragona reached out to a Fox spokesperson on Tuesday about whether Bartiromo planned to address or correct her false claims about undocumented immigrants registering to vote en masse in Texas. 

“According to a Fox News spokesperson, Maria Bartiromo was clearly citing a source of hers and never said she confirmed the story,” Baragona subsequently posted to X. “The spox also said it is worth noting that Republicans have been speaking a lot about this issue of noncitizens voting in recent months.”

Meanwhile, Bartiromo did not mention her debunked claims on her Wednesday show, though she did ask the Republican member of Congress she hosted questions like, “Do you have any evidence that you can share with us that tells us that illegals are registered to vote?” and “Do you think you’ll be able to stop it? I mean you’ve got 76 days before the election. How many people will be voting illegally?”

Fox’s response simply emphasizes the problems with Bartiromo’s coverage:

• Yes, it is true that Bartiromo was citing a “source,” if that’s what you want to call her friend who said they heard it from a friend who heard it from their wife. 
• Yes, it is true that Bartiromo never said she confirmed the story. 
• Yes, it is true that Republicans have sought to undermine the election with baseless claims of noncitizens voting.

But all of that is bad! 

If you work at a national cable news network, you’re not supposed to feed your viewers thirdhand, unverified gossip simply because it supports the claims of a political party, and if you do that and the story is subsequently debunked by everyone who bothers to actually try and look into it, that’s a black mark on your credibility.

I don’t want to suggest there was some halcyon day when Fox acted responsibly — the network prioritized Republican political success from its founding — but there was a time when the network’s executives at least tried to curtail its most obvious and indefensible journalistic failings.

When the hosts of Fox & Friends in 2007 cited a right-wing outlet’s quickly debunked report that then-Sen. Barack Obama had attended an extremist Islamic madrassa as a child, the network made clear both publicly and privately that its standards had been violated. 

Host Steve Doocy issued a clarification on the show’s next edition. John Moody, at the time Fox’s vice president for news, also acknowledged to The New York Times that the network had erred. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” he said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Moody also sent a daily editorial note to staff stating what should have been the obvious: “For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC.” 

Seventeen years later, seeing a text from a friend detailing a story the friend’s friend heard from their spouse apparently means it is ready for air on Fox. The spokesperson’s comments about Bartiromo effectively confirm as much. And meanwhile Jesse Watters, the network’s biggest star, is now apparently preparing to send a staffer to Hawaii to “dig deep” and “get the truth” about Obama’s birth certificate.

It all makes perfect sense when you recognize that Watters, Bartiromo, and the spokesperson work not at a news outlet, but a propaganda network that is in the tank for Trump’s presidential campaign. The peril for Fox, however, is the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit shows how letting people like Bartiromo spin up poorly sourced conspiracy theories to benefit Trump can get very, very expensive.