“It appears we have been punked,” said Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, after the latest on-air mishap to hit the conservative network. In a segment broadcast on Wednesday evening, Bartiromo appeared to believe she was interviewing Dennis Organ, president and chief executive of the pork-producing giant Smithfield Foods. In fact, she was interviewing Matt Johnson of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere. The six-minute interview started with Bartiromo asking about a Covid-19 outbreak in a Smithfield plant in South Dakota and the company’s plans for vaccine distribution. Johnson responded by discussing “dedicated and resilient” staff and a company commitment to provide “extensive personal protective equipment” to employees. But soon the tenor of the encounter changed, as Johnson “personally promise[d] that we’re going to do better, and the first change under my leadership is transparency and, at times, brutal honesty”. With that, he launched into a diatribe about the food industry and how it could contribute to another pandemic. Farms were “petri dishes” for infectious diseases, he said, drifting into tell-tale smirks and pauses before Bartiromo pulled the plug on the interview. Responding to a request for comment, a Fox News spokeswoman pointed to Bartiromo’s on-air correction. “We want to apologise to Dennis Organ, Smithfield Foods and to our audience for making this mistake,” Bartiromo said. “We will of course be more vigilant.” Smithfield’s chief administrative officer, Keira Lombardo, said in a statement: “A simple Google search for a photo of our CEO would have prevented this from happening. This allowed false information to be aired, and Fox has aired an apology for this complete lapse.” Johnson told the Wrap he did not have “too guilty of a conscience” over the stunt, which he said was in part inspired by a recent on-air fact check about voting fraud claims and involved “fake email addresses and fake phone numbers and lots of pitches”. Critics of Fox News and Fox Business pointed out that this is hardly Bartiromo’s first encounter with false information, referencing more than just the on-air fact check of claims about Smartmatic, a company which makes voting machines. Bartiromo landed a November interview with Donald Trump, his first after his election defeat by Joe Biden. In that encounter, the host referred to Trump’s baseless claims “many times that this election was rigged, that there was much fraud and the facts are on your side”, then backed the president up. “Then they did dumps,” she said, referring to claims that Democrats flooded states with fraudulent votes, “big massive dumps, in Michigan, Pennsylvania and all over. This is disgusting and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted.” The host later said an unidentified “intel source” was “telling me that President Trump did in fact win the election”. In fact her own network, like others, has called the election for Biden and election officials from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have said there was no fraud. Bartiromo “used to be the Larry King of the business world”, Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, told the Washington Post. “But I think she saw the ratings for the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and even Lou Dobbs, and she saw that the way to survive at Fox is to go all-in for Donald Trump.” Bartiromo has maintained access to the president, interviewing him as other reporters have been sidelined. She told the Post: “Ever since I started covering President Trump and covering the coup and the effort to take him down, I became the enemy of the media and the activists and the mobs. I have an edge. I mean, I stick to my guns and I’m not easily blown off.” In a previous role as a reporter for CNBC during the dot.com boom, Bartiromo attracted a cult following and came to be known, to some, variously as the “Money Honey” or even the “Sophia Loren of financial journalism”. Among her admirers then was Joey Ramone, lead singer of the Ramones, who began contacting her for stock tips. Speaking to the Guardian in 2006, Bartiromo said: “I started getting emails from him and he would say, ‘Maria, what do you think about Intel or what do you think about AOL?’ and I thought, ‘Who is this person emailing me? It’s crazy, he’s calling himself Joey Ramone.’ “Sure enough it was him and we developed this friendship. And he was attuned to the markets. He really understood his own investment portfolio. Joey Ramone was a fantastic investor.” The frontman, who died in 2001, later contacted Bartiromo to say he’d written a song about her and invited her to CBGB to hear it. Bartiromo didn’t make the gig – she had to be up at 6am – but she sent a camera crew. “Sure enough, the cameraman came back with the tape and there’s him and his band with this song Maria Bartiromo and I just love it. It’s a tremendous tribute. I just love that. It’s great, just great.” The song appeared on Ramone’s final album.