MSNBC’s Katy Tur Reveals Sexist Comments From Boss at News 12: ‘Your Boobs Look Too Big in Your TV Clothes’

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MSNBC anchor Katy Tur detailed the sexism she faced while working at New York’s News 12 during the early days of her career.

In an excerpt from her new memoir Rough Draft, published by Vanity Fair, Tur revealed that the news director of News 12’s Bronx and Brooklyn division made several critiques of her appearance before she was allowed on air.

“While I had made it through the reporter trial and then got a full-time job, covering Brooklyn, everything I’d done had either been a tryout or a voiceover,” she explained. “My face wouldn’t appear on screen until the news director had approved me for air.”

Tur went on to share that a few weeks into the job, which she started in 2007, she was called into the news director’s office for a review of her “abilities.”

“He leaned back behind his big desk, in his big office, and took on an air of casual truth. He spoke,” she wrote before recalling the conversation. “‘Your boobs look too big in your TV clothes,’ he said with a shrug. He might have said breasts or chest or just gestured with a pencil. I don’t remember, exactly. But we both nodded in mutual understanding even if I was mortified at the same time.”

Tur also claimed that the director suggested a new hairstyle.

“He reached for a binder on his desk. Ladies and gentlemen, I shit you not, it was a binder full of women,” she continued. “He pulled out a half dozen glossy pictures of the sort you might see in the front of a salon at the mall.”

After handing Tur the binder, the director told her that in order to appear on camera at his station, she would need to cut her hair.

“’You can choose from any of these styles I’ve picked out for you,’” Tur remembered him saying, later cracking that the hairstyles included, “Severe bob cuts. Hard angles. Terrible streaky highlights. Lots of hairspray.”

Tur went on to call his haircut proposal and his comment on her body “a little presumptuous, not to mention sexist?”

Not only was Tur instructed to change her appearance, according to the expert, but was also asked to change her name:

“Your name” he said. “It’s taken.”

He was talking about Katie Couric, co-anchor of the Today show, one of the most famous journalists of the era. I can’t be “Katy” because she’s “Katie”? Apparently not.

I don’t remember the story, but sometime that summer “Katharine Tur,” a twenty-three-year-old with her hair shaped into a hard plastic dome, appeared for the first time on television in New York or anywhere.

I’m happy to say the tape is not online.