[ad_1]
On Tuesday’s show, her comments — in which she suggested to her guests that, when she was a child, dressing in blackface was accepted “as long as you were dressing up as a character” — left many NBC News employees stunned and exasperated. At a post-broadcast meeting, members of Ms. Kelly’s “Today” team expressed discomfort with what she had said on-air, according to several people briefed on the discussion, although Ms. Kelly was not present.
Her remarks came during a round-table discussion of how, as she put it, “the costume police are cracking down” on Halloween outfits. “You do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween,” Ms. Kelly said. “Back when I was a kid, that was O.K., as long as you were dressing up as a character.”
She added that she was perplexed by the criticism of Luann de Lesseps, a cast member of “The Real Housewives of New York” who was criticized for dressing up as Diana Ross, complete with an outsize Afro wig. “People said that that was racist, and I don’t know, I felt like, who doesn’t love Diana Ross?” Ms. Kelly said, adding: “I can’t keep up with the number of people that we’re offending just by being normal people.”
Several hours later, she emailed an apology to colleagues. “The history of blackface in our culture is abhorrent; the wounds too deep,” Ms. Kelly wrote. “I’ve never been a ‘pc’ kind of person — but I understand that we do need to be more sensitive in this day and age.”
“NBC Nightly News” devoted segments to Ms. Kelly’s remarks during its Tuesday and Wednesday editions. On Tuesday, the broadcast included a Fox News clip from 2013 in which Ms. Kelly weighed in on the race of Santa Claus. “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” she said. That same clip was shown again during Wednesday’s 7 a.m. hour of “Today.”
For NBC News, the “blackface” flare-up was yet another headache.
The news division has come under scrutiny for what its executives may have known about the workplace behavior of Mr. Lauer before he was fired in 2017 after allegations of badual harbadment were made against him. In May, an NBC investigation cleared network executives of any wrongdoing in the matter, but drew criticism because it was conducted by in-house counsel, rather than an outside law firm.
Mr. Brokaw was also accused of making unwanted advances — claims that the anchor denied. And in September, the journalist Ronan Farrow and his NBC producer, Rich McHugh, accused the network of impeding a report about Harvey Weinstein and badual badault, an investigation that Mr. Farrow continued at The New Yorker. (NBC said it did nothing wrong.)
Source link
