KTLA 5 News meteorologist Liberté Chan was just reporting the weather for the weekend, as she had being doing on a regular basis for the past few years. But on Saturday morning, she was interrupted in the middle of a live broadcast and handed a cardigan to cover up her dress. Chan was wearing a sequined black dress that bared her shoulders, an outfit that she was proudly showing off on social media prior to the show, but apparently, not everyone was feeling her look.
During her weather report, one of her fellow anchors reached his hand into the shot and passed her a sweater.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “You want me to put this on? Why? ‘Cause it’s cold?”
“We’re getting a lot of emails,” her co-anchor could be heard saying off-screen.
“What? Really?” she said, shocked, while reluctantly putting on the gray cardigan. “I look like a librarian now.”
Some viewers had apparently taken offense to her dress and emailed the station to say that her outfit was inappropriate. “It looks like she didn’t make it home from her cocktail party last night,” one person wrote. “No doubt about it: Liberté Chan’s New Year’s Eve cocktail dress is inappropriate,” another said. “That would have been true even if it was a 10 p.m. broadcast.”
However, after the audience saw that Chan was asked to cover up in the middle of the show, and once social media caught wind of what happened, there was even more outrage going in the opposite direction. KTLA was accused by thousands of body shaming and being sexist, and they even demanded that the anchor who gave her the cardigan be fired.
Chan insists that she was not actually offended by what happened that morning. “For the record, I was not ordered by KTLA to put on the sweater,” she later wrote in a blog post. “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. Since talking to my team, I want our viewers to know it was never our intention to offend anyone. We are friends on and off the air and if you watch our newscast, you know that.”
What’s your take on the situation?
