Karl Stefanovic – who has famously admitted to hosting the breakfast show Today while intoxicated – has weighed in on an American TV anchor who presented news while being clearly drunk.

Heather Kovar quit her job at New York station WRGB CBS-6 when videos went viral showing her slurring while presenting the news, and mixing up her colleages names.

Stefanovic gave a very enthusiastic performance while presenting the Today show back in 2009, the morning after the Logies and later admitted that he was still drunk when he went on air.

Today, Stefanovic ironically introduced a news segment about Kovar’s intoxicated incident. “Now to a story going viral. This is not something you’d see in Australia ever: the TV anchor shocking viewers as she slurred her words and appeared dishevelled on air,” Stefanovic said.

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After the segment aired, Stefanovic exclaimed, “that’s not a knife”. The phrase is slang that someone says when they think they could have done something better.

While it’s well known that Stefanovic fessed up to being drunk during the 2009 broadcast, well-known media personality Sam Armytage has recently revealed that she too has appeared on-air while intoxicated.

“I mean, hello, we’ve all be on air drunk,” Armytage said to Stefanovic, in tanepisode of her podcast, Something To Talk About that Stefanovic.

“I was sneaky, I didn’t get written up in the papers – nobody knew.”

Stefanovic responded, “Thank you, finally an admission! Karl gets awful admission out of Sam, ‘I was drunk too! Nobody noticed.’”

Armytage hosted Sunrise alongside co-host David Koch from 2013 until 2021. She has previously revealed that she left the popular breakfast program for a number of reasons.

“There were many, many reasons,” she said on her podcast. “But one of the reasons was that I felt that the fun just wasn’t there anymore.”

“I was the lightning rod for the show at that point.

“Everything, I said was analysed and I was getting belted to death by the bloody Daily Mail and you just think: ‘Oh, is life worth this?’”

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