Harris Faulkner Warns Media Is Using Race To ‘Divide’ Country After Trump’s NABJ Interview

Fox News host Harris Faulkner said Thursday that an event where former President Donald Trump clashed with an interviewer “was not fair” and warned that the mainstream media was using race to “divide” America.

Trump was interviewed by a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists conference that included Faulkner, ABC News reporter Rachel Scott and Semafor reporter Kadia Goba, during which he clashed with Scott over her first question about Trump’s criticism of left-wing members of Congress and former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, and also commented on Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that he “didn’t know she was black” until a few years ago. Faulkner noted there were efforts to have Trump disinvited from the event and that Scott’s question derailed the panel.

“So much of what America is focused on and so much of what it started with all that emotion and the gotcha moments from the interviewer who was seated directly to his left, has really overtaken the fact that we had an opportunity to talk with the president who walked into a racial storm yesterday,” Faulkner said about Scott’s initial question of Trump. “There were journalists, activists, whatever you want to call people who let their politics show who wanted the NABJ to rescind their offer to have the 45th president of the United States come and sit.”

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Faulkner also took aim at Scott for not acknowledging that Trump survived an assassination attempt less than three weeks before the event and said that Scott’s question “got things off to an emotional start” in the discussion.

“I mean, it did not take much to show humanity, and in that moment, I was so disappointed that that did not happen,” Faulkner said. “I couldn’t control it, but it got things off to an emotional start, and you and I both know that once that happens and you are interviewing someone, there is an agenda, and I’m glad that you guys played a clip of that, because America and the journalists in the room who, by the way, sat and listened, somewhere laughing with the president, little jokes and quips he was making, there were some critical in the audience too, but it was expressed respectively or respectfully rather, there was a way to take some of the energy out of that moment with that reporter.”

Faulkner also blasted corporate media for its focus on Trump’s contentious exchange with Scott at the start of the interview and his comments about Harris, warning that allowing unfair journalistic practices would increase the divisions in the United States.

“I can’t impress upon you how much complicity there is, potential complicity, for mainstream media to lock in on the issue of race and to divide us as a nation further if we don’t carefully call out when we don’t see things being treated fairly,” Faulkner said. “And you know what? I will take some heat from it, for it, rather, in certain circles of journalism. My home is Fox News; our viewers deserve the truth, and that moment was not fair.”

Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.