On Thursday’s The Faulkner Focus, Fox News host Harris Faulkner offered her first public reactions to the wild National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Convention panel she participated in that was hijacked by far-left reporters Rachel Scott of ABC and Kadia Goba of Semafor sparring with former President Trump.
Faulkner didn’t mention them by name, but she didn’t have to in voicing her displeasure with how it went:
[T]he former President sat for what was supposed to be a really wide ranging interview with three journalists. I was one of them at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. It was an interesting tip-off. It started acrimoniously and it — it was very emotional. Things got pretty fiery as we went on. As you know me, I leaned in with the questions that, I think, matter to journalists, so we’ll — we’ll talk about that.
After a break, Faulkner said the forum “took a hostile turn before [she] could even ask one question” as “the journalist to his right” (i.e. Scott) “leaned in with this”, giving way to portions of Scott’s first two questions and Trump answers (which can be seen in full below):
Here's the full exchange on the insane first question at the #NABJ convention by ABC's Rachel Scott....
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 31, 2024
Scott: "I want to start by addressing elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about… pic.twitter.com/qU5b5K8EBH
ABC’s Rachel Scott: “If we can move on now to the state of the race, sir, I want to get back to the campaign. Senator J.D. Vance is your running mate. He's had a lot of controversy lately, and I want to read you a few things that he has said in the past. He said the Democrats… pic.twitter.com/VpYwvgdNoD
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 31, 2024
Faulkner acknowledged “race is a tough issue” and “it doesn’t matter when it comes up and when there’s emotion mixed in,” things become “even tougher.”
“I was really glad I was there to witness it because right from the get, it was not what it should have been,” she added.
After noting the evasiveness from Vice President Harris’s team and soundbites of both Harris and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denouncing Trump’s comments at the panel about Harris’s racial identity.
Moments after Faulkner uttered a “wow”, she brought in Trump 2024 campaign official Caroline Sunshine, who thanked her for “actually doing your job as a journalist rather than deciding to play commentator like the other woman on that stage, who should have honored her profession but instead took the opportunity to play commentator, which was a disservice to that audience.”
Sunshine went onto say Trump sparring with Scott “was a master class...in how you fight, fight, fight and tell the truth and yet another textbook case study in how the mainstream media’s liberal bias plays out.”
Before moving onto a question she didn’t receive a straight answer from at the forum, Faulkner added further tea on what was going on behind the scenes:
The President walked into a situation where people had already expressed they wished the NABJ had canceled him. Then, some of those same people showed up for the forum and didn’t move out of the seats. So, he did what you said. He showed up. And he was trying to be an honest broker in that position. There were a lot of technical — I’ll call them shenanigans cause we don’t really know what was going on. I could hear very little of what he said. He could hear very little of what I said. I want to put that out there.
To see the relevant FNC transcript from August 1, click here.
