Media

Fired-up Bartiromo takes aim at CNBC

The “Money Honey” can sting like a bee.

Maria Bartiromo — who joined Fox Business Network last month after 20 years at rival CNBC — blasted her former employer and colleagues as not being able to land big-name interviews and only being interested in sound-bite TV.

“Six or seven years ago, my boss came and said, ‘Maria, you’re the only one who’s working, the only one who’s picking up the phone and getting big hitters on the air, and I need to make other people do that,’ ” Bartiromo dished in an interview with the Daily Beast.

Also, various CNBC producers would try to cherry-pick Bartiromo’s high-profile interviewees, like Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, for their own shows, the 46-year-old business journalist — whose morning political talk show on Fox News Channel debuts Sunday — told the Daily Beast.

“Unfortunately, it was being in an environment where I was competing with my own company all the time,” Bartiromo said. “It got very frustrating to me.”

Bartiromo turned down a five-year contract offer from CNBC to jump to FBN, she said.

More and more, Bartiromo noted, CNBC was interested only in sound-bite interviews.

“I mean, you turn on CNBC today and you see, like, six boxes all the time,” she said. “You only give the segment six minutes — so everybody gets, like, 30 seconds.”