A female meteorologist was handed a sweater live on-air to cover up her bare shoulders after the television station allegedly received emails from viewers complaining about her attire.
On Saturday, KTLA meteorologist Liberté Chan was delivering her weather report when an arm holding a sweater suddenly appeared to the right of the television screen.
“What’s going on?” Chan asks as she walks towards her co-anchor. “You want me to put this on? Why? Cause it’s cold in here?”
“We are getting a lot of emails,” Chris Burrous said.
“What?!” Chan exclaimed. “Really?” she asked as she put on the sweater.
“I look like a librarian,” Chan said.
Chan posted a clip of the segment to her Facebook page and the video quickly went viral.
The meteorologist also took to her blog to “share a few personal thoughts” on what happened during Saturday’s broadcast.
“I was wearing a black, beaded sparkly dress and apparently, the station received a slew of negative emails from viewers saying the dress was inappropriate for air,” Chan wrote. “I’ve worked on-air for 10 years and by now, I’ve learned that everyone has an opinion and you have to have a thick skin to work in this business. It’s a visual medium and sometimes your outfit works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Prior to the sweater incident, Chan tweeted that her original dress “keyed out.”
“To be perfectly honest, the black beaded dress was a backup. The pattern on my original black and white dress didn’t work on the weather wall (for some reason, it turned semi-transparent), so after my first weather hit at 6am, I changed,” Chan said on her blog. “For the record, I was not ordered by KTLA to put on the sweater. I was simply playing along with my co-anchor’s joke, and if you’ve ever watched the morning show, you know we poke fun at each other all the time.”
Chan also posted a video on Facebook of the meteorologist and Burrous reading emails allegedly sent to the station by viewers.
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“Liberté Chan looked like she stayed out late at a party and came to work in the same dress. It’s not appropriate for the morning weather report, the show’s producers should not have allowed her to do it in a cocktail dress and handing her the sweater during her report was also in poor taste…” Burrous said reading from his laptop.
“Wow, people are mad, it’s a dress people,” Chan said in the video. “Can we talk about my weather performance,” Chan said.
It isn’t the first time news anchors took to the air to read messages they have received, criticizing how they look on television.
Last year pregnant Global News meteorologist Kristi Gordon read viewers emails on-air, criticizing her about how she looked on television.
“Nowhere on North America TV have we seen a weather reader so gross as you,” the letter read.
“We now turn off Global.”
-with a file from Amy Judd