Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner has called out her morning TV show competitor The View in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, likening the left-leaning show to a recent Massachusetts council meeting mobbed by yelling transgender activists.
Faulkner, 59, threw some serious shade on the ABC hosts for resorting to ‘vitriol’ and having a ‘myopic’ worldview and a ‘dicey’ approach to facts.
‘On The View, there is this sort of, shout it, cuss it, do whatever you gotta do to get a little more attention around the hot topics,’ she said.
She let loose on The View stars, including Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, after her 11am Fox News show, The Faulkner Focus, beat them for the first time in a shock ratings upset.
Faulkner The Focus received 2,552,000 viewers in January, edging ahead of The View’s 2,508,000 – a significant de-throning of the long-running ABC show by Faulkner’s, which has a smaller potential audience on cable.
In the wide-ranging interview with DailyMail.com, Faulkner, 59, does not hold back – revealing why her opposition to transgender competitors in women’s sports is personal and describes her bi-racial marriage to her Jewish husband, 57, jokingly calling herself a cougar.
She described how her Baptist-Christian faith was a central part of her life, and lauded the Trump administration’s racing start with DOGE shaking up Washington DC.
But the Fox News anchor’s saltiest comments were reserved for the women with whom she competes in the 11am hour on TV: the hosts of ABC’s The View.
‘I’ve seen it when there was a powerhouse journalist,’ Faulkner told DailyMail.com. ‘When Barbara Walters was leading it.
‘But now I don’t really know what the show is, apart from talk, talk, talk; a lot of combativeness.
‘We have lots of guests who feel spicy and passionate about what they say,’ the newscaster said. ‘That’s not unique to The View or to any other show that I’ve done.
‘What I do think is unique to them is vitriol.
‘A news director told me early in my career, you don’t have to shout breaking news, and you don’t have to shout the truth.
‘It’s not personal,’ she added. ‘But you gotta have the chops to be able to do it.
‘I’ve seen Sunny Hostin read so many apologies on the air recently for the legal exposure of some of the things that she and others have said on the show. That’s dicey.’
Faulkner actually appeared on The View herself in 2018, promoting one of her books about the life lessons she learned growing up as a ‘military brat’ to her Army Airman, Vietnam veteran father.
During her appearance, Faulkner, who is black and married to a white man, said she was perturbed when Hostin brought up her race – but said Goldberg was ‘gracious’ and brought the conversation back round to her book.
‘Sunny Hostin came after me, they had put a picture of my biracial children on a huge digital wall behind me, and she took the conversation to race,’ she said. ‘I knew my kids would be watching.
‘Whoopi goes, ‘You know what, let’s talk about the book.’ And I appreciated that.’
Controversies on The View include Goldberg in 2022 claiming the holocaust was not about race. Years earlier in 2010, she defended Mel Gibson saying he is ‘not a racist’ despite reportedly using the N-word and making anti-Semitic comments.
In 2015, guest co-host Kelly Osborne got in trouble for saying ‘If you kick out all the Latinos who’s going to clean your toilets?’
In one episode, Behar revealed she dressed in blackface when she was younger.
And on camera in a 2023 show, Goldberg asked co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin if she was pregnant when she was not.
Faulkner said she believes her Fox News show’s ‘superpower’ is that it’s live, not pre-taped like The View, as well as having guests with diverse political views.
‘I think that’s difficult to do if you only see the world myopically, and that’s the feeling that I get when I watch other shows, The View as an example,’ she said.
‘That isn’t to say that they don’t have people on with different opinions, but the shouting is coming from the left on that show.
‘It looks like one of those anti-DOGE meetings or the hearings on Capitol Hill. Democrats right now are apoplectic and they’re shouting and they’re cussing at us.’
Faulkner was comparing The View to the scenes at a Worcester, Massachusetts council meeting on February 11, where transgender activists yelled angrily at the public podium and city leaders voted in favor of making the town a ‘sanctuary city’ for the trans community.
The Fox News host covered the raucous and controversial meeting on her show the day of her interview.
Though her comments suggested The View is not live, the ABC show usually is broadcast live, though sometimes airs pre-taped shows or repeats.
For example, in March last year, Entertainment Weekly reported the airing of a ‘pre-taped’ episode ‘before live shows kick up again’.
The show advertises itself as typically having ‘Live broadcasts five days a week’.
And while Faulkner Focus did beat The View in January’s ratings, ABC pointed out that one of the weeks included in the viewing data was when The View was showing repeats, not its usual live shows.
The channel also defended its show, saying it ‘continues to rank number one in Households and Total Viewers’.
A network source noted that The View is an opinion show ‘with the mission to have dynamic conversations from diverse points of view.’
‘This is what the audience expects from The View and they are showing up. The show continues to rank number one in Households and Total Viewers,’ the source added.
Faulkner has been outspoken about her opposition to some transgender activism, including her belief that transgender women should not compete in women’s sports.
‘I have an elite athlete in my family, my youngest daughter, who just wrapped up eight years of her young life, competing at an elite level in gymnastics,’ she told DailyMail.com.
‘She won her final competition, a huge regional, in January. We weren’t expecting it, but she won a gold medal for the vault. We’re really proud of her.
‘The sport would be very different if there were biological men who could compete against my daughter.
‘I want her to be safe. And I want her to feel like her best accomplishments matter, and that the competition itself is fair.’
Faulkner said her other daughter, Bella, who turned 18 in December, is planning to attend college in the fall.
She said Bella was ‘remarkably confident’ in her political opinions – though she did not disclose what those were.
‘Bella knows who she is and she’s remarkably confident about for whom she’ll vote,’ Faulkner said.
‘She wants to study early childhood education, and with a specialty in children who are challenged and need extra love and support.’
But Faulkner did let slip that Bella became more interested in the politics of the tax system after the teen got her first paycheck.
‘She’s working and she sees taxes being taken out, and she’s like, ‘Well, what’s this going to?” the mother of two said.
‘She is a fan of Doge because she’s like, ‘I want tax efficiency’.’
The Fox host, a Baptist Christian, is married to former TV reporter-turned-media consultant Tony Berlin, who is Jewish.
She admitted to fearing for her biracial, ‘ecumenically-raised’ daughters after seeing recent outbreaks of anti-Semitism on school campuses, but said that she believed in leading by example.
‘As a person of color, and as a person who speaks boldly about faith, it’s very adjacent when people are hated for the way that they believe, and their position in society,’ she said.
‘Am I more worried about them standing out for their hair texture and their skin color or their faith? I’m worried about all of it. And not just for my kids.
‘I really think it’s important for Jewish children on campuses to know that they have partners, that the hate on the campus is a microcosm compared with the love that’s out there.
‘That is necessary, I think, to kind of diffuse the hate that we have seen on these campuses.’
Faulkner has been snatching as much family time as she can before her two teens fly the nest. That includes a surprise trip to Hawaii last year, launched before dawn like one of her father’s military excursions.
