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Friday, December 21, 2018

Meet the Only Black Woman Hosting a Daily Show on a Cable News Network

Harris Faulkner, host of Outnumbered Overtime
Harris Faulkner, a newscaster and television host, is currently the only African-American woman hosting a daily news show on one of the three major cable news networks, Fox News Channel. Faulkner, known for being straightforward, has been both praised and criticized for her opinions. Nevertheless, she loves her job that she calls "a tremendous amount of responsibility."
Faulkner hosts the news show Outnumbered Overtime, which airs from Monday through Friday. She is the only African-American woman to do so, alongside African-American men Craig Melvin and Don Lemon who hosts daily shows on MSNBC and CNN, respectively. Black women are often hosting shows that air on weekends on those news networks.

For years, she worked hard as a reporter and anchor at local news channels until she landed a national job as a correspondent for the syndicated news magazine show A Current Affair until it ended its run in 2005. Since then, she continued working at Fox News where she covered breaking news and presented headline updates, among others.

In 2014, she began working as one of the co-hosts on the daytime Fox News show Outnumbered. Three years later, Fox News has committed to giving her her own daily show that she anchors called Outnumbered Overtime.

"Harris does breaking news better than just about anybody in the business. She understands the stories, she knows how to help the audience understand what's really important and what we need to learn and where we need to go with the story," Jay Soroko, Executive Producer of Outnumbered and Outnumbered Overtime, said about her on Business Insider.

However, many became upset when she seemed to take sides with President Trump in his statements regarding the 2017 deadly violence in Charlottesville. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple described Faulkner's comments at that time as "pro-Trump shilling."

Her book, 9 Rules of Engagement - A Military Brat's Guide to Life and Success, somehow received approval from Trump when he promoted it through Twitter. However, it rather added to the things many people thought conflicts to what she should be as an African-American woman.

Amidst all that, Faulkner believes that "those probably happen all the time because we're not all alike. I don't speak for all black people, and I hope that others don't speak for me. We're all different, we all come with our own points of view."

"To get a presidential tweet from the Commander-in-Chief about a military book that you've written is pretty awesome. And it wouldn't matter where that person's politics would be, it's the President of the United States. But that's not because I'm black that people give me negative feedback because the president tweeted about my book. They do it because they think that it's all about politics," she continued.

Meanwhile, she also puts out her criticisms against President Trump whenever she thought it is needed. Recently, when Trump cast doubt on the death toll of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Faulkner called out how it's quite not fitting to Trump's "Make America great again" slogan.

Regardless of the criticisms she occasionally receives in any way, she said she likes her job and she loves where she is right now.

"I love it. If I didn't want to be here, I wouldn't be here. I hope that people look at me and think that I'm good at my job. I also encourage myself on a daily basis to do my job in such a way that it would encourage others to hire people who look like me. So I challenge other networks to see the value of a different perspective on things. I consider it a calling and a blessing that I get to do it. And I love doing it here."



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