Alison Morris is an American journalist. She is a former news anchor at
NBC News.
Early life and education
Alison Morris was born and raised on
Long Island, New York
Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United States and the 18th ...
, where she attended
Our Lady of Mercy Academy, an all-female private Catholic college preparatory school. She later graduated with a bachelor's degree in
sociology from
Yale University in 2001.
Career
Morris began her career in 2002 when she worked for
CNBC Europe and ''
The Wall Street Journal Europe'' as a reporter in
Paris, France.
In 2005, Morris returned to the United States and became a reporter for
KDKA-TV in
Pittsburgh. In 2010, she moved to FoxCT (now known as
WTIC-TV), where she became one of the channel's news anchors. In 2014, Morris switched to
Fox 5 New York, working as the channel's business news anchor. In July 2019, Morris was then hired by
NBC News, where she has been a news anchor for the network's streaming service ''NBC News Now''. In January 2020, Morris additionally became a weekend anchor for
MSNBC.
On her January 26, 2020 broadcast on
MSNBC, Morris was reporting on the death of retired basketball player
Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bean Bryant ( ; August 23, 1978 – January 26, 2020) was an American professional basketball player. A shooting guard, he spent his entire 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Widely r ...
, who was one of nine people killed in a
helicopter crash
A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...
earlier in the day. When Morris referred to Bryant's former team of the
Los Angeles Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers are an American professional basketball team based in Los Angeles. The Lakers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Western Conference Pacific Division. The Lakers play their ...
, she claims to have verbally stumbled and said "Los Angeles Nakers", immediately self-correcting to "Los Angeles Lakers". This caused many people to accuse her of saying the racial slur "
nigger" on air, which she denied. The controversy led to the starting of a petition to have her fired, which gained over 184,000 signatures. Morris said she had stuttered,
combining the words "Knicks" and "Lakers" into "Nakers".
Morris left her role at NBC in May 2022, stating in social media posts that she planned to become a
sommelier.
Personal life
Alison Morris lives in
Manhattan with her husband, Scott. Morris is fluent in French and regularly travels to Paris to visit friends she made while working in the French capital. She is also a fan of the
New York Yankees.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Morris, Alison
1979 births
Living people
People from Long Island
Journalists from New York (state)
NBC News people
MSNBC people
American women television journalists
Yale University alumni
21st-century American women
21st-century American journalists