Billy Bush, the fifty-four-year-old media personality, has painted a sharp picture of what it was really like working alongside Al Roker at Today. Bush opened up to The Nerve With Maureen Callahan on Friday, calling the veteran weatherman, who is seventy-one years old, “territorial, vindictive and chronically unprepared” at work.
The bad blood, as per Billy Bush, didn’t start at Today. It reportedly traced back to his days hosting Access Hollywood, where Roker’s passive-aggressive behavior toward him was already well established. Things didn’t improve when Bush joined the NBC morning show in May of 2016. Roker had publicly welcomed his new colleague that same month, writing on X,
“A big welcome to @billybush joining our crazy family. Tradition: New guy buys dinner.”
Bush wasn’t buying the warmth, though.
“He does this all the time,” Bush shared.
“There’s something about me in particular, forever, that was [he] likes me but fears me, didn’t want me anywhere near,” he added.
Bush’s core accusation was that Roker viewed him as a threat, not a colleague. The Today veteran, in his telling, masked genuine hostility behind the kind of collegial gestures that look good in public.
Billy Bush reveals NBC had plans to remove Al Roker from Today before the Trump tape changed everything:
Before the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape resurfaced and ended his time at Today, Billy Bush says he was sitting on some significant information about Al Roker’s future at NBC.
Billy Bush shared on The Nerve With Maureen Callahan that the network was already making moves to push Roker out by the spring of 2017. As per Bush, NBC executive Noah Oppenheim had pulled him aside and given him a clear directive.
“You need to survive until March,” Bush recalled Oppenheim telling him, explaining that network officials had every intention to “unload” the “toxic” Roker and
“get him out of this deal.”
The two men had been working alongside each other on the third hour of Today, an arrangement Bush had little faith in from the start. He was candid about why.
“[Roker is] maybe the worst interviewer on television,” Bush said.
Billy Bush added that the hour “would never be a successful hour” because of it. None of it played out the way NBC had planned, though.
Bush’s sudden dismissal in October of 2016, after the 2005 tape surfaced in which President Donald Trump was heard boasting that his fame allowed him to grab women, cut everything short. Bush referred to the incident simply as “the Trump thing,” noting that it brought his run on the network to an abrupt end before any of those plans could move forward.
Billy Bush says Al Roker would “like” tweets calling him a racist while Matt Lauer was no friendlier:
The social media behavior bothered Bush just as much as the in-person tension. He told The Nerve With Maureen Callahan that Roker would actively “like” posts on social media that took aim at him, including one where a user labeled him
“a whitesplaining racist.”
Bush was pointed about how that landed.
“I’m the new guy and this dude’s liking tweets from people that are calling me things that are career-ending and awful and not f***ing true!” he said.
Roker wasn’t the only one making life uncomfortable. Matt Lauer, who lost his lead anchor role on Today in 2017 after sexual misconduct allegations were made against him, wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat either. Bush said his NBC bosses were in his corner, but the vibe from Lauer and Roker told a different story.
Both men, in his telling,
“definitely did not want me there.”
Bush recalled the atmosphere being almost something you could physically sense.
“You could feel it … I could feel it in the room with them,” he shared.
He put Roker’s ability to get away with it all down to one thing. Three decades on Today had made the weatherman untouchable, as far as Bush was concerned. And he wasn’t shy about what he really thought of Roker at the core of it.
“People don’t know how mean he is — he’s mean, he’s mean, he’s a mean person. When you say rageful and all that, yeah — there is rage in there. There’s jealousy, and I talk about vindictiveness, but he’s mean. He doesn’t share the air,” Bush said.
Edited by Ryan D’souza