Megan Kelly Firing Scuttles Our Scheduled Appearance
After my New York Times article was published, we began to receive a number of press inquiries, including from 20/20, Good Morning America, and the Today Show. Both GMA and the Today Show were only interested in doing a story if they would be the first to air it. We wound up choosing the Today Show because they offered to fly us to New York to appear live on the show, whereas GMA would have only been a pre-recorded segment.
A Today Show producer became our handler and did background interviews with Madi, Bryce, Jess and myself. They scheduled us to appear live on November 5th and booked flights and hotels for us. We excitedly made plans to see friends in New York and invited a bunch to come be members of the studio audience. We went shopping and bought fairly expensive outfits to wear on the show.
On October 23rd, Megyn Kelly made racially insensitive comments about black face being ok for Halloween costumes, and was fired shortly thereafter. As we were scheduled to appear on her hour of the show, we wondered whether this would effect us, but NBC’s preparations continued on so we assumed everything was ok. We were pleased that we would not have to meet Megyn and read rumors about who would be the replacement host with interest. We were hoping for Kelly Clarkson.
On October 29th, NBC sent a crew to film an interview with me that would be used as an introduction to our appearance. (Bryce went into NBC in NY for a similar taping) The interview went well and I looked forward to seeing it. During the day on November 1st, another Today Show producer called each of us to do yet more background interviews, but then later that afternoon we received an email telling us that our appearance had been cancelled.
We received very little in the way of an explanation of why we’d been cancelled other than that Kelly’s firing had caused their plans to change. It didn’t make much sense to us given the amount of work NBC had put into it. In a crisis, wouldn’t you want nearly ready material? Nor did we receive much in the way of an apology for the disruption to our lives: we’d all taken off work (Madi gave up a week of shifts at Yardhouse, costing her hundreds of dollars) and my brother Nathan had bought tickets to fly to Seattle to take care of Mom while I was away (NBC did pay his flight cancellation fee).
We disappointedly let our friends and family know that we wouldn’t be appearing and cancelled our NY plans. I put my hat in hand and contacted GMA to see if they would still be interested in our story. The producer that we’d been talking to said she would check to see if there was still interest. We’re still waiting to hear back.
