Reports have surfaced that BET network suspended a producer after a joke about Beyonce and Jay Z’s daughter aired on the show 106 & Park shortly before the show was put on hiatus.
Social media was in a frenzy when Karrueche Tran, Chris Brown’s on-again off-again lover, appeared as a guest host on Monday on the music video countdown show and and made a joke about the appearance of the toddler’s hair.
During a tongue-in-cheek segment called, “Things Blue Ivy might have been thinking during Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards,” Tran said Blue might have been thinking, “I really did wake up like this because my parents never comb my hair.”
She followed up the comment with what appeared to be a nervous laugh and apologized, saying she loves baby Blue.
But the apology wasn’t enough and Tran was attacked on social media while others criticized BET airing a joke that insulted a child.
Now, a BET producer has landed in hot water over the wisecrack.
Tran explained on Twitter that she did not write the line, and that she was simply reading from the teleprompter.
BET announced that 106 & Park would be going on a two week long hiatus, to which the BeyHive joked that Beyonce put the show in “time out.”
An anonymous source at the network told the Associated Press that the producer responsible for the joke was suspended.
There is no evidence, however, that Beyonce called for the producer to be suspended or for the show to be put on pause.
BET denied any allegations that the show was on hiatus because of the unfortunate one-liner. Officials said that the show’s regular hosts, rapper and actor Shad Moss and singer-songwriter Keisha Chante, were going on vacation.
A source from the network said the vacations were planned in advance and that the timing of the break was just a coincidence.
Either way, executives at the network made it clear that they weren’t happy that the “stupid, unthoughtful” joke making it to the air.
BET’s president of music programming and specials, Stephen Hill, publicly expressed his disappointment over the incident as the online backlash poured in unabated.
“Last night on ‘106 & Park’ there was a stupid, unthoughtful joke made about a young child,” Hill tweeted on Tuesday.
Hill said the network had reached out to Beyonce and Jay Z to apologize and also extended an apology to Tran.
“We also apologize to [Tran] for putting her in that position,” he tweeted after social media users continued to bombard the aspiring model’s social media pages with insults.
