Tamron Hall received much praise after departing from The Today Show in 2017, opting for her own talk show. But as the Tamron Hall Show appeared to be an opportunity for a Black journalist to cover topics related to the culture, Dr. Ian Smith claimed that’s not the case.
In an interview with SiriusXM’s Karen Hunter, bestselling author and The Doctors host Smith accused Hall and those working on her daytime talk show of only featuring a certain group of Black people.
“They won’t bring on African-Americans or Latinx people that talk about education, or sociology, or medicine, or law,” he said. “They will only bring us on when we’re an entertainer or an athlete, or we do something salacious.”
Smith continued, “There is a talk show with an African-American host, with an African-American executive producer that has said to publicists, ‘Do not pitch us your Black clients. We are not a Black show….We don’t want to be looked at as a Black show.’”
“I’m putting this show on blast,” Smith admitted during the interview. “Because, when white shows and white hosts don’t let us on, we criticize them. But the same criticism has to be held for shows that are helmed and hosted by Black people that keep us off the airwaves.”
After pressing for who Smith was talking about, Hunter first guessed Wendy Williams after hearing that it was “a talk show on a main channel.”
Smith then all but confirmed that he was actually discussing Hall when she asked, “Was she formerly on cable and then was on NBC and then moved to her own show with her name on it?”
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Hunter then claimed that white supremacy was the true culprit, saying that Hall might have felt the need to make her white counterparts feel comfortable. Though Smith nodded in agreement, he also pointed out that Hall’s viewers are overwhelmingly Black, not white.
“If they only knew that the person you’re watching every day has sent a mandate to her producers to not book African-Americans unless they did something scandalous and embarrassing and shameful,” he said. “If they only knew that,”
Hall has not responded to Smith’s claims.
