‘Today’s Jenna Bush Hager Reveals She Was Warned Not To Say “Y’all” When She Started Working In Television: “Do They Just Want Us To Be Robots In Blazers?”

Today hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb were shocked to read a new headline from NPR that dared to ask, “Are Southern Accents Disappearing?“

After Bush Hager shared that her Texas accent comes back whenever she’s “one margarita deep” with her girlfriends, Kotb revealed that news broadcasters were expected to have “the same accents” so they all “sounded the same.”

“I always thought that was strange because people all come form different places and they are who they are,” she told Bush Hager. “But since then, all accents are welcome. It’s fun! It’s not like everyone needs to be so cookie-cutter.”

Bush Hager then shared an experience she had when she first started working in television. “I remember when I first started somebody told me to stop saying y’all. They said, ‘You shouldn’t say y’all.’ And I said, ‘Well, why not?'” she said. “Do they just want us to be robots in blazers?”

Kotb replied, “I don’t know why that’s the way it was, but it really was, they wanted uniform. This is what a reporter looks like, an anchor looks like and sounds like this, and go to a voice coach and speak this way.”

“I wonder if Anchorman sort of changed everything,” Bush Hager joked. “Will Ferrell changed the industry.”

She’s opened up quite a bit about the early days of her career in broadcast journalism, including the time she spent as “the lowest paid correspondent at Dateline” when she first joined NBC News in the late ’90s.

“I think it’s one of the hardest things for women to do. I know for years I was definitely making a fraction of what my male co-anchors were making,” Kotb told Bush Hager. “I actually never asked because I didn’t want to be difficult.”

She added that it “was pretty clear at the time” that she was the lowest paid correspondent compared to her colleagues.

“I remember thinking to myself, I can’t pay my bills here, I couldn’t pay all my bills at the same time. So I was like, I’ll pay this one, and then pay that one,” she recalled.

Bush Hager added, “I think it’s important we teach our girls to both be humble, to work hard, but then not be afraid to ask for what they deserve.”

Today with Jenna and Hoda airs on weekdays at 10/9c on NBC.