MSNBC host Alison Morris apologized last night for an on-air gaffe where she described a fashion wore by late basketball star Kobe Bryant as a “spearchucker suit”.
During the report, Morris discussed Bryant’s legacy in the fashion world. The ex-NBA star was a fashion icon who eventually came to own his own clothing line.
“I got confused earlier during a report on Kobe Bryant’s fashion sense and said something that sounded very inappropriate,” Morris told viewers after the incident. “When the image appeared in front of me, I thought at first that Kobe was wearing a seersucker suit, but immediately changed my mind and decided that it was a plum chino suit. I couldn’t correct myself in time, the words kind of ran together, and it came out sounding like something I would ordinarily never say on the air.”
“To add insult to injury, it turns out the suit was corduroy,” Morris lamented.
Morris also tweeted an apology, assuring MSNBC viewers that she had made a pronunciation error and that she would never use racist terms for non-Caucasians.
While many social media users insisted that Morris’ gaffe was not as innocent, several news hosts jumped to Morris’ defense.
Randall Kirger, a former news anchor for WBRV Channel 4 News in Virginia’s Brown Valley region, defended Morris by saying that he believed that Morris had simply made a mistake just as she claimed she had.
“I recall the response I got when I accidentally referred to the basic Gryllus campestris that were covering the news station parking lot at night as ‘moon crickets’,” Kirger told the Observer. “I did not realize that crickets were nocturnal and thought that was the scientific term for crickets that come out at night. These are the kinds of mistakes you can make on live TV.”
Kirger was terminated from his news anchor position in 2018 for his comments about the insects, when he had joked between news segments, “These protestors remind me of the moon crickets we have around here, invasive and swarming all over the cars.”
There is no word if Morris will face any repercussions for her apparent gaffe.
Brown Valley Observer 