Saucy Sue

The long knives are out for WNBC's Sue Simmons. She should be suspended, bleats rivals, for bellowing on the air in a live tease: "What the f**k are you doing?" It could be a great excuse for WNBC's new management to jettison the 65-year-old anchoress after 28 years at the station. Miz Simmons could be headed for a permanent beauty rest...

Salty Sue Simmons, who shocked Channel 4 viewers with a four-letter tirade, is famous for her liquid dinners between broadcasts, potty mouth and zany behavior, former co-workers told The Post yesterday. Simmons delivered a jaw-dropping f-bomb Monday night as she read a teaser for her 11 p.m. newscast, prompting an on-air apology from the veteran anchor a half-hour later. The incident didn't stun some former colleagues. "Sue Simmons likes the sauce and she can be cranky about it," a former WNBC employee told The Post. "She was sometimes a little tipsy [on the air] to the point where colleagues would take notice." "Silly Sue A Salty Swiller" NYP [Awesome alliteration.]

"Ch. 4's legal eagles were trying to stop the spread of a clip of Simmons' expletive, citing copyright infringement." Richard Huff NYDN But it still exists in the Internet etherland.

Even the staid NYT weighed in: James Barron NYT: "Maybe that will teach Chuck to stop reading things on his computer monitor and start paying attention to Sue. It looked like a spat between two people who have worked together for so long that they know each other’s rhythms a little too well. And, of course, they have worked together, for ages — or at least since 1980. There was Chuck Scarborough, reading something on a computer screen embedded in the desk and not listening to his co-anchor, Sue Simmons. So she let him have it in what sounded like mock derision. But she used a word seldom heard on the noncable air, and then only by accident — a word that is not publishable in the newspaper. The difference between them and, say, a couple having a spat over the dinner table was that they were on television — live television, on a network-owned station in the nation’s largest media market."

"What was Sue Simmons thinking? Verne Gay Newsday

Don Imus: "She's had so much plastic surgery she looks like Yoko Ono."