Banderas: “Not My Fault”

Censored “Bear Alert” video appears on Fox Report. Less than a week after Julie Banderas told her Twitter followers that she “would never condone animal cruelty” and had instructed her producers “not to air the bear on a trampoline video on [her] show ever again,” her recalcitrant FR producers did just that. Albeit briefly AND censored.

Caught in the middle of an internecine Fox Report “feud” between weekday anchor Shepard Smith (who strangely relishes the video of a sedated black bear falling from a tree onto a trampoline, being catapulted high into the air, and falling forcefully face-first into the ground) and weekend host Julie Banderas (who has renounced the video, has banished it from her show forever but also has strangely purged those very proclamations from her Twitter page), Fox Report producers appeared to search for a middle ground. And, perchance, they actually found it on the “Bear Alert” Sunday.

With Banderas’ animal rights bona fides in question  (in light of her strong positive Tweets against “animal cruelty” and consequent decision against ever airing the Trampoline Bear video again coupled with her almost immediate erasures of those Tweets from her Twitter page), Banderas seemed eager to clear the air. Before her “Bear Alert” segment, to her fans and followers, she Tweeted, “[C]oming up.. a fox bear alert!”

Later, when Banderas was reading the “Bear Alert” about a New Hampshire black bear “house thief” as field bear footage ran, prankster producers inserted a censored Trampoline Bear clip into the video. (The bowdlerized footage showed only the Trampoline Bear falling onto the trampoline and bouncing high into the air: the bear’s crashing into the earth was appropriately excised.) When the Trampoline bear clip aired, Banderas exclaimed, “You guys!” as the floor crew erupted in laughter. When Banderas finished her report, she shook her head and remarked, “Hm. Tried to get that one past me. Not my fault!”

Happily, Banderas appears to be standing firm in her animal rights position. Furthermore, perhaps, adventitiously, the Fox Report producers may have found a Trampoline Bear video compromise that will still amuse Shepard Smith. If not, i.e., Smith really needs the bear’s crashing head-first into the hard ground and crumpling underneath its own weight for a laugh, then he may well earn the title Shep de Sade.

Tags: FNC, Fox News, Fox Report, Julie Banderas, Shepard Smith, Trampoline Bear