A local news reporter is going viral after a blooper she posted caught the attention of the internet.
Teagan Brown, a weekend sports anchor and reporter at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, NBC affiliate WMBF, shared the clip on July 17 to her X page.
In her post, she explained that while her producer told her she was “clear” following her live hit on the beach, meaning she was no longer on-air, that was definitely not the case.
Viewers saw an animated transition to the next broadcast story but instead of showing the anchors in the studio, the screen came back out to Brown’s live shot without her knowing.
“Thank you!” she says, twirling the mic in the air and walking off camera.
As of the evening of July 18, the video has millions of views and nearly 53,000 likes. Brown jokes that she’s thankful nothing worse happened when she thought she was no longer on TV.
“People were commenting, saying, ‘At least I didn’t pull an ‘Anchorman,’” she laughs in an interview with TODAY.com.
Brown — a recent graduate of Syracuse in her first post-college gig — says that after her segments on-air, she usually does something little, like the mic twirl, to “get the energy out.”
“‘I’ll just do what I usually do, toss my mic in the air. Or sometimes I’ll spin, or, I don’t know, toss my mic,” she says. “It’s just getting the energy out after I just went on live TV and everything.”
She added that immediately after the hit, no one from her workplace thought to tell her about the incident.
“I had no idea that happened on live TV. They didn’t tell me afterward, like the director and or my producer in my ear weren’t like, ‘Oh, by the way, Teagan, everybody just saw that,’ so I had no idea,” she laughs, noting that hours later, a digital producer finally mentioned it to her.
Brown says she’s a “big fan” of sharing her blooper reels online and this is “definitely not the first time” something’s gone awry during one of her segments.
“Honestly, a lot of the comments are people making gifs, just saying things like ‘Me rolling out of the office on Friday’ or ‘On the way to the weekend,’” she says.
She said others have asked her if she used to be a baton twirler.
“Did I do one year of color guard? Yes, yes I did,” she quips.
She adds that there hasn’t been any negative backlash to the incident that she’s seen.
“At the end of the day, reporters are people. People in the control room, they’re people, we make mistakes,” she says. “But sometimes the mistakes are fun and why not post them on Twitter (X) for the world to see?”
