NBC Weatherman Fired

St. Louis NBC affiliate KSDK has unexpectedly fired their longtime meteorologist Anthony Slaughter.

“I’m pretty much as dumbfounded as you are,” Slaughter said in an interview to Saint Louis Magazine. “I just got called into an office one day, and they just said we’re parting ways…It was a three-minute conversation.”

The weatherman has been at KSDK off and on his entire career, shifting back and forth between San Francisco and the Missouri station. He moved back to his native St. Louis in search of family support some time after adopting two twins that were put up for foster care.

According to Saint Louis Magazine, he found plenty of support from his family—including from his famous uncle, three-time Emmy winner and This Is Us star Sterling K. Brown.

The magazine also shared that multiple sources mentioned the meteorologist’s constant clashes with the station’s director of content, Morgan Schaab.

Apparently, Slaughter was unhappy with KSDK’s constant push towards branding and web content for the station’s streaming app, and simply wanted to focus on reporting the weather. The station is constantly in third place in local TV ratings, so station heads have opted to try to appeal to web audiences.

When the magazine confronted him about his termination, he agreed with the anonymous reports. “I had an attitude, because they’re taking us down the wrong direction,” he said.

“It’s like, bro, nobody’s watching the weather for 5-10 minutes,” he continued. “Can we just get back to the normality of just telling the weather? Instead of having to say all this Weather Impact? You know, jump through these hoops and try to push people over to the streaming and be sure to check us out on [5 on Your Side+, the station’s streaming app]. We’ll be doing this extra weather, and we’re not doing anything different. We’re just talking longer.”

The meteorologist, however, isn’t bitter about his departure and is looking forward to having more personal freedom in his day-to-day life.

“I can go and do what I want. I can be free, you know, I don’t have to answer to anybody anymore. I’m done,” he said. “I put 100 percent forward. When I left out of that building every single day, I knew that I did my best.”