It was amazing to see Fox News do a little dare and criticise Donald Trump yesterday. The new face of this “serious” Trump coverage inside Fox News is Julie Banderas, a beautiful 43-year-old mother of three who hosts Fox News’ America’s News Headquarters and Fox Report during the weekends.

Until yesterday, Julie’s coverage on Fox was rarely ever the kind one would call memorable although on the whole, she often tries to put herself in the category of the more politically objective Fox hosts.

However, yesterday, it was not her journalistic style (a la Fox News) that stood out to us in addition to her reviving Fox News as a network to take seriously on Trump matters when looking for objectivity. It was her almost unnoticeable bigotry when she listed being called “a Muslim” as one of the things that President Obama had to endure with dignity while he was president. As if being called a Muslim should ever be a thing to be endured.

For context, Julie listed being called a Muslim right after being called “Stupid” and right before being called “underqualified”, “a sellout” and “a hater”. Watch the clip below

To avoid immediately casting her into the lot of bigoted journalists who should not be trusted when it comes to any kind of coverage involving Muslims, we tried to check old clips of her work or things she’s said or done outside of Fox. We were even secretly hoping to find an apologetic post on social media where she’s said something to the effect of having made a slip during the segment where she listed Obama being called a Muslim as a bad thing.

There wasn’t anything on her Twitter where she’d posted tweets after the segment to show she thought her comments were wrong.

So we kept checking and sure enough found something. She’d done the same thing while covering the Finsbury Park Mosque attack on the 18th of June, discussing the incident as though Muslims somehow should be blamed for all radical acts of terror done in the name of their religion.

During this segment, she and Washington Examiner‘s Tom Rogan (another non-Muslim) tried to prescribe lessons for Muslim clerics on how to deal with “those in their Community who have become radicalized”. It was the “powerful” action of the Finsbury Imam who reportedly calmed the situation on the sidewalk after the attack that she found to be such an “example” of “those in the Muslim community who condemn any kind of violence in the name of religion” and she like the savior that she is, figured “many people need to take note of” this.

To be fair, Julie was not the only one who sounded like a White Saviour focusing more on “the heroic response of the Muslim Community, especially the Imam” after the attack on Muslims by Darren Osbourne. From the CNN to media houses here in Nigeria, the reportage about the heroism of an Imam who stopped a rowdy crowd from attacking a suspect was appallingly shocking.

Yet, Julie’s comments yesterday implying that Barack Obama being called a Muslim was one of the horrible things “in the book” that he had to endure as President makes her June 18th coverage of the Finsbury attack more peculiar in hindsight. It is a link in a growing pattern of her anti-Muslim tropes and commentary that obviously needs to be checked.

Roqeebah

Creative mind. Enthusiast. Learner. Multipotentialite. And here, an assistant editor.