Outside Harris Faulkner’s corner office at News Corporation’s New York headquarters, there’s a shiny silver plaque that acknowledges her as a ‘Woman of Excellence,’ awarded by the Professional Organization of Women of Excellence Recognized (POWER).

Inside her office, six gleaming Emmy awards are prominently displayed, alongside numerous framed certificates, awards, and press recognitions that adorn the walls.

At 60, Faulkner is no stranger to accolades, but her latest recognition holds special significance. Recently, she was declared the top-ranking female host on the Daily Mail’s first-ever Power List.

Remarkably, she was the only woman and the sole Fox News anchor to break into the top five of the News Anchors and Political Pundits category. She secured fourth place, surpassing Fox colleagues such as Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, and Bret Baier, with the top spots going to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, and ABC’s David Muir.

In an exclusive conversation with the Daily Mail, Faulkner expressed her gratitude, saying, ‘Understanding the lengths the Daily Mail went to identify what individuals value in information dissemination means everything to me. Being in the top five, and the lone female, is a major honor.’

Faulkner, who is a mother to teenage daughters—Bella, a new college student, and Danika, still in high school—finds extra meaning in this achievement. She adds, ‘It’s crucial that my daughters witness this recognition. A heartfelt thanks to your team and your readers. It’s simply incredible.’

Faulkner has just finished filming back-to-back morning shows for the news network; her daily solo hit, the Faulkner Focus and Outnumbered, on which she has been a regular since joining as a founding co-host in 2014.

Why does she think she is such a trusted fan favorite today?

‘I have a connection with the viewers because I’m thinking about them,’ she says. ‘I try to honor the viewer with whatever guest we have on by asking questions that go beneath the obvious. We don’t need the obvious. We need more. Is there anything that we’re missing? It’s not enough to say, “Oh the country’s divided.” Well, what are the pressure points to solve some of this division now?’

That perspective, Harris explains, was learned.

‘I grew up in a military family, I had leadership in my household and when horrible things would happen my dad would say, “Remember who you are and whose you are. You’re ours and you belong to the Lord.” I sort of go into every day like that,’ she says.

It hasn’t taken long for Faulkner to reference her father, Bobby – a Lieutenant Colonel and Army Aviator who flew multiple missions in Vietnam – and the faith that he and her mother, Shirley, imbued in both her and her younger sister.

During her conversation with the Daily Mail, Faulkner returns repeatedly to a background so clearly alive in her to this day.

It informs everything about her, from her approach to a career spanning more than 20 years to raising the girls she calls her ‘women in training,’ and it can be distilled into two words: prayer and preparation.

She says, ‘I grew up across a lot of different places: Fort Pearson, Atlanta, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Stuttgart, Germany. We were all over the place from the time when I was just a couple of months old. And across it all I saw a lot of prayer and a lot of leadership.’

If Faulker is ever troubled by self-doubt in the face of that legacy, it doesn’t show.

Everything about her is polished – from that gleaming plaque by her door, to the rose gold Gucci shoes on her feet, to the steel that, one suspects, glints at her core.

Married for the past 27 years to former television reporter turned media relations CEO Tony Berlin, 58, Faulkner rises each day at 5am when the house is ‘completely quiet.’

She checks emails and does ‘a tremendous amount of reading.’ Then she puts in her AirPods and listens to some music – at the moment it’s Christian hip-hop that provides the soundtrack to the start of each day.

By 6.45am she’s in a car heading from her home in New Jersey into the city and the studio. It’s time she uses for off-air conversations – with a victim, or the family of a victim, she’ll be interviewing on the show, for example – ‘just to let them know there’s a human on the other end of the camera.’

‘Then I hit the building and it’s basically non-stop,’ she says. ‘From the minute my foot touches 1211 6th Avenue, it’s on. I check in with my team, jump on an editorial call then usually 8.30am/9am it’s hair and makeup. We’re just cooking the whole time.’

She checks in on her social media frequently – filming little live-streams from set, engaging with her audience: ‘I like to know what has their attention because we’ve had so many national breaking news stories that are heartbreaking, shocking… assassination in America.’

Faulkner was roundly praised when, in 2020, she sat down with Donald Trump and pressed the president on matters of race and social justice during the civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Then, she asked Trump if he was the president to ‘unite all of us, given everything that’s happening right now.’

Now, she says, she would ask him: ‘How do you talk with Americans about this moment knowing that it feels like we’re in an assassination culture. What do you say about that having faced two attempts on your own life?’

It isn’t just an academic question for Faulkner. Like many at her network, she was personally touched by the assassination of Turning Point USA founder, Charlie Kirk, 31, whom she regarded as a personal friend.

She says: ‘I interviewed Charlie almost exactly nine weeks before his assassination on July 16, and I saw something in him that I had not seen before, in all the times that I met him and talked with him.

‘With Charlie there was a fierceness and hopefulness and a bright light,’ she remembers.

When Kirk was assassinated – gunned down with a single shot to the neck as he spoke with students at the University of Utah’s campus in Orem – Faulkner’s phone lit up with alerts, messages and missed calls.

‘I was in a coffee shop with a friend,’ she says. ‘I saw about six different versions of that moment and I’m thinking, “What am I looking at? This must be AI.” But by the third video I’m seeing, this is all different angles, these are all different versions; this is real.’

Faulkner and her husband have a home near Scottsdale, Arizona. She says: ‘It’s not far from where Turning Point USA is based and not far from the Kirk family home. Charlie tried to get me to go to a couple of events and whenever I was home [in Arizona] we would talk about faith and DM each other.

‘I want to go to Turning Point USA and just kneel and pray. It doesn’t have to be an organized occasion. I will reach out to Erika, I will say you know, I’m here, and I’m part of the Arizona family. Right now, I know we’re praying together.’

As things stand, Faulkner says, she is still ‘gathering answers’ and reflecting on how to respond to her own daughters’ question, ‘Why are there so many bad things happening in the world?’

But she points to Erika Kirk’s very public forgiveness of her husband’s killer as a ‘spiritual shift in the ground.’

She says: ‘We are openly talking about forgiveness now and I support that, because I know our young people need to understand this moment and choose the light and not the darkness.’

Again, her thoughts turn to her father – who passed on Christmas Day, 2020. She says: ‘He lived through a time when the country was as divided as it ever was – coming out of the Jim Crow era, he served a country where he was spat on in the street, where signage said, “No Coloreds. White Only,” in retail and restaurants.

‘His own brothers couldn’t understand how he could risk his life for a country he couldn’t equally participate in. And my dad always said, ‘Well you have to find your own divine assignment and mission and mine is to make sure that America is secure.’

‘He knew what he was fighting for and, back home, my mother had the other end of that battle, and she answered it with unceasing prayer.

‘My father said, “It’s not about who we are right now. It’s about the potential of who we will be if we do the things we’re called to do right now.” He believed that as a country we are special, and we are young enough to grow into what we need to be.’

Her father’s convictions are not only engrained in Faulkner. They are, she feels, as pertinent now as when he first shared them with her.

Faulkner says: ‘I think my father was right in his approach to life. I don’t want people to look at me and say, “I hear your words but what are you doing?”

‘I want my daughters to look at me and see I walk the walk.’

‘Look, you can take a break and sit down if you’re fearful or worried,’ she says – Faulkner has security at home, at work and at her speaking events – ‘but you don’t quit.’

Returning to the Daily Mail’s Power List which, among other things, ranked presenters according to how likeable and trustworthy viewers deemed them, Faulker says: ‘People see me as someone they can trust and that means a huge amount. That makes you want to work even harder to be that person.

‘I think Charlie Kirk’s assassination has reignited in me a knowing of what it really takes in the battle for more light than darkness. I’m right here and I have to do my part.’