Hey, y’all. Southerners like to use this friendly hello to greet family, friends, and even strangers on the street—but apparently it is not so acceptable on television.
Jenna Bush Hager says she was initially discouraged by network executives from greeting viewers on Today with a “Hey, ya’ll,” which they didn’t see as inclusive.
“They were like ‘Hey, y’all, isn’t for the whole country.’ And I was like, ‘Well, but it’s who I am,'” Bush Hager said on the December 2 show. “When they said, ‘You can’t say y’all,’ in my gut, I was like, ‘But why?'”
Co-host Hoda Kotb commented that she faced requests to change her image early on in her career, so it took a long time to learn how to be herself on TV.
“If you don’t fit, they want you to wear something a certain way, cut your hair a certain way, speak a certain way,” Kotb chimed in. “Which I know when you came to the network, too, it’s like, ‘Welcome in, but you have to change.'”
The end result is “I’m not being myself. I’m trying to fit here. I’m trying to speak their language,” Kotb added.
Ultimately, Bush Hager resisted the call to ignore her Texas roots because it didn’t feel genuine.
“We have to pretend to be news people?” she asked. “Because whenever I tried to pretend to be a news person, I felt like I was acting. And we all know … I’m not a great actor. When you try to pretend you’re somebody else, it feels crazy.”
As fans of Today know, part of the charm of Hoda & Jenna is their ability to open up and be themselves—and that means an occasional “y’all.”
