Bartiromo: Too much source poaching was going on at CNBC

Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast profiles Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo and writes about her decision to leave CNBC last year.

Grove writes, “The constant battle to book exclusive airtime with heavy hitters like Frazier actually figured in Bartiromo’s stunning decision last November to cross enemy lines from CNBC, where she’d been a franchise player for two decades, to join the Fox Business Network, Roger Ailes’s second-place financial television operation, along with the top-rated Fox News Channel.

“‘It wasn’t just the intense competition, it was a competition with my own company at CNBC,’ said Bartiromo, who is marking five weeks of anchoring her two-hour stock market program on FBN, Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo, and on Sunday debuts her live hour-long interview show on Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.  (In other words, her famous name and face are all over both cable outlets.) ‘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.’’

“The result was worse than annoying. Frequently, she recounted, she’d persuade a financial titan like billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group private equity firm, to come on her afternoon show, Closing Bell, only to have various CNBC producers pull him aside and try to poach him for their own programs. ‘Unfortunately, it was being in an environment where I was competing with own company all the time,’ she said. ‘It got very frustrating to me.’

“There were certainly other compelling reasons to jump ship. Ailes is an old friend and mentor. He was Bartiromo’s boss at CNBC in the mid-1990s when he made her a star–the first television journalist to report live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He was also reportedly offering a nice uptick in pay–from an estimated $4 million a year at CNBC to $1 million to $2 million more at Fox–as well as a live network Sunday show (instead of her taped syndicated weekend program, On the Money) and the freedom to conduct lengthy on-air interviews as she saw fit. She was also given a classy title, Global Markets Editor.”

Read more here.