As Fox News struggles, Harris Faulkner thrives, surrounded by her Kansas City love
Harris Faulkner strolls around the Fox News studio … in her house.
She wears a red Kansas City Chiefs shirt, which fits in with the decor showcasing her favorite NFL team and the University of Kansas basketball team she grew to love while anchoring the news at Kansas City’s WDAF-TV for eight years. This includes a framed photo of her singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a 1999 Chiefs game — whose opponent that day was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, no less.
But in the room, there are also a camera, teleprompter, studio lights and a massive flat-screen TV that provides the background illusion of broadcasting from her cable network’s New York headquarters amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I just launched a major show from the ‘man cave,’” Faulkner says of her home in Edgewater, New Jersey.
The only thing that seems out of place among all the Chiefs and Jayhawks memorabilia is the smattering of Arizona Wildcats gear, a contribution from her husband, Tony Berlin.
“On the floor underneath where I anchor every day for Fox is a letter A that’s a rug about the size of a Mini Cooper,” she says. “But I told him, ‘You just get the rug and the wall art. That’s it. Pretty much everything else is Kansas. I mean, a girl’s gotta breathe.”
As Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has battled declining ratings for the first time in 20 years while figuring out how to shape its narrative after Donald Trump’s divisive presidency, Faulkner herself continues to breathe just fine.
A month ago saw the debut of her new show, “The Faulkner Focus,” which now leads into her roundtable show, “Outnumbered.” (They air at 10 and 11 a.m. Central Time). According to the latest Nielsen ratings, “Focus” is averaging 1.4 million daily viewers, better than MSNBC in that time slot but below CNN.
Covering the Capitol riots
The 55-year-old newscaster acknowledges that doing the shows from home works great for her two middle school-age daughters, who nowadays get to see their mom on the job.
“My oldest actually helped us choose the title of the show,” she says, “and ‘Faulkner Focus’ is something they tease me about because I’m always saying, ‘Come on girls, focus!’”
However, for Faulkner, the situation offers a mixed blessing.
“There are times when I really love it because I love being around the girls, and there are times when I have no separation between my job and my personal life,” she says.
“I do find myself feeling the heaviness of whatever is going on for probably longer than I might. I don’t have the distraction of breaking the scenery, breaking the conversation and walking into the house. Everybody in the house is talking about what’s going on because they can all hear it coming from the basement.”
Case in point: the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“I’m live on air, and I can see where (the crowd) is heading,” she says.
“Those were tough moments to watch and to narrate when we’re all as a nation seeing it for the first time.”
Faulkner views the riots as “an abject failure of reading the intelligence coming in that said they needed to be better prepared.” She also stresses that those who took part need to be arrested and held accountable. Nevertheless, she believes it’s dangerous to impart guilt by association to all the other Trump supporters who did not take part.
“Let’s not lose sight that — for a comparison — on 9/11, one of the biggest things we dealt with as a nation was the failure to communicate with one another,” she says.
There is plenty of finger-pointing being directed at what led to this domestic terrorist attack. What is Fox News’ culpability?
“For me as a journalist, it’s to report the facts. Only the ones that are there. I don’t do the editorial side. I’m not looking at this from any perspective other than more than 150 million people voted. And 74-plus million of them didn’t see the person they voted for. They were not all at the U.S. Capitol. So what I’ve tried to do since that Wednesday was talk to as many people as I can from every walk of life, whether it be among those 74 million or among the 81 million who voted for Biden. I think those voices matter most,” she says.
‘An entirely different path’
While the Capitol riot proved a significant event during her tenure with the network, Faulkner claims she earned the most feedback for her 20-minute sit-down interview with Trump last June.
The esteemed industry publication Columbia Journalism Review praised the exchange in an article titled “How Fox News’s Harris Faulkner Showed the Way for Political Journalism.”
“She carved an entirely different path from that followed by many of her colleagues,” it said. “She was neither antagonistic nor admiring. She put herself into the interview, framed in her roles as a Black woman and a parent, in a way that journalists rarely do with her skill and care.”
Faulkner responds, “That was one of the highlights of my career in journalism because I was given notice and recognition for being a person across from the president.”
Half a year later, Faulkner admits she would love to ask Trump some follow-up questions if given the chance.
“(I’d ask) did you want to finish what you started with Operation Warp Speed? Did you want to jump in and govern the vaccination process more hands-on? Did you want to protect your legacy more than you wanted to concentrate on trying to challenge with such first-person presence the election of November 3, 2020?”
She says her new “Faulkner Focus” show is built around three mandates: “Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it now?”
But, realistically, her network’s hyper-partisan bent doesn’t always make that easy.
This month, voting technology company Smartmatic launched a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News, naming fellow hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro in the suit for a coordinated “disinformation campaign.” The next day, Fox canceled Dobbs’ show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” (Faulkner was not targeted in the suit, which also named Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.) Fox filed a motion to dismiss, citing First Amendment grounds.
Meanwhile, Fox’s own lawyers defended host Tucker Carlson in a slander case last year by arguing he is “not stating actual facts” when discussing topics and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”
Its begs the question of whether Fox News considers itself actual news or simply opinion-heavy theater.
“I can sing the national anthem, but I don’t consider myself an entertainer,” says Faulkner, who served as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
“We are news, but we are both news and opinion. … Our editorial side is popular and it’s big, and I know that we are news because of the balances going on. People are not loving hearing what the truth is right now, but they do continue to watch for it. And don’t underestimate our ability to balance that.”
Back in Kansas City
Ongoing accusations of politicizing seem a far cry from the traditional news format Faulkner anchored during her popular run in Kansas City. From 1992 to 2000, she headlined a Fox 4 team that included co-anchor Phil Witt, meteorologist Mike Thompson and sports broadcasters Frank Boal and Al Wallace.
“What makes Harris an excellent newscaster is that she is an excellent reporter,” says Witt, who retired in 2017 and still lives in the KC area.
“She is intelligent, clever and quick with a superb ability to gather, process and analyze information and then get it all boiled down to the most important elements. She is also tenacious and unflappable in pursuing stories. In our time as co-workers and anchor partners, I marveled at her drive to get facts she needed to report accurately and completely.”
Her coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 sticks out most in his memory.
“She left immediately after news of the bombing broke and worked tirelessly for days from early morning until late at night, more than holding her own against the national news crews,” he says. “It was difficult, hectic and exhausting work — and she was brilliant.”
Faulkner agrees that the Oklahoma City coverage remains an indelible memory of her time in Kansas City. She also cites covering the major flooding of the 1990s as equally unforgettable.
“That was such a hard time for communities that were hit,” she says.
“I don’t know if people know this who live outside of flood zones but this smell is left behind from the gook and the mud and water that’s mixed with whatever has seeped into it from sewer systems and utilities that are giving way. I can still smell that if I close my eyes.”
She left Kansas City to join the evening anchor team at KSTP-TV in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, before moving to Fox News in 2005.
Although it’s been years since she left the Midwest, Faulkner says people come up to her all the time who recall her days on KC newscasts.
“I always love it when people say, ‘Gosh, you look the same … but with better hair.’ There was a lot of humidity in those Kansas City summers,” she says, laughing.
Leslie Jones as Harris Faulkner
Now people are just as likely to mention another TV appearance when they meet her — albeit one that isn’t exactly her. She found herself parodied by actress Leslie Jones in several high-profile sketches on “Saturday Night Live.”
Jones most notably portrayed her during the comedy show’s spin on the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing for its 2018 season premiere.
“I have yet to meet Leslie Jones. She and I have crossed paths on Twitter. But that was a surreal moment for me,” she says.
On paper, the bawdy comedian may not be the performer who immediately jumps to mind to play the elegant Faulkner. But the anchor herself considered the caricature uncanny.
“I did a double take. Leslie Jones even had my blue nail polish on,” Faulkner recalls.
Come to find out about a year and a half ago that one of our freelance makeup artists was Leslie’s makeup artist for those two gigs. But she had my mannerisms down, like when breaking news would happen. I thought it was funny. I know she was making fun of me, and sometimes people get offended or whatever. First of all, I’m a fan of hers, and I love the remake of ‘Ghostbusters.’ But I was honored that anybody would think anything I do is worth parodying.”
Fond KC memories
Faulkner says she has kept her ties to Kansas City, traveling back most recently in 2018 to give a speech at the 75 anniversary of the VFW.
It was an occasion near to her heart, considering she was raised an Army brat. Her father, retired Col. Bobby R. Harris, was a combat pilot who served two tours of duty in Vietnam. Sadly, he died on Christmas of 2020. (She actually adopted her father’s last name as her first when she was younger, selecting the surname Faulkner from a distant family member.)
Her eight years in Kansas City have stuck with her, as her Chiefs and Jayhawks gear can attest.
“When I attended UC Santa Barbara, I never went to basketball games. But when I moved to Kansas City, Allen Fieldhouse was where everybody went,” she says. “I still don’t know a whole lot of people who graduated from KU, but we were always at those games. So they’re my team.”
Faulkner stresses that she has nothing but “fond memories” of Kansas City. Most of them are tied to Chiefs games and anchoring with her co-workers, which she admits led to experiences both poignant and “really goofy.”
One in particular stands out.
“I was a weekend anchor, and I was filling in for somebody. It was very early in my career, probably ’92 or ’93. The word in the teleprompter said ‘obscenity.’ I was a little nervous. And I said, ‘In Overland Park, they’re really outraged because they’re going to outlaw obesity,’” Faulkner says.
“Phil slid off the set. In the middle of that, one of my earrings fell inside my blouse. I didn’t even realize what I’d said. But people were laughing so hard that they walked away from their cameras. It was like an unmanned ship.
“After laughing so hard, Phil slid back in. We went to the tease. Then Phil said, ‘Obscenity. OBSCENITY. When we come back, you have to say obscenity. … And by the way, you’re missing an earring.’”
Jon Niccum is a filmmaker, freelance writer and author of “The Worst Gig: From Psycho Fans to Stage Riots, Famous Musicians Tell All.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "As Fox News struggles, Harris Faulkner thrives, surrounded by her Kansas City love."