Meteorologist Laura Mock has received criticism about her appearance before, but one that was recently emailed to her entire staff hit her particularly hard.
Mock, 33, who works for Fox 23 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, usually ignores such comments. But the most recent criticism she received was for the wig she now wears on camera after undergoing chemotherapy treatment.
The subject of the email was her name: “Laura Mock.” And in the body of the email, the sender wrote: “Would you please stop messing around with your hair and talk about the weather instead? It looks like you have fake hair on.”.
Mock posted a screenshot of the message on Facebook along with her response. “News flash! This is fake,” Mock wrote. “I started losing my hair (thanks to chemo!) at the end of June and have been wearing a wig for just over a week now.”
“Think twice before sending hateful emails to your local reporter. This one went all the way to our newsroom. Does it bother me? Not really. I have other things to worry about, like the cancer I’m trying to banish from my body. That doesn’t mean I should tolerate comments like this.”
The meteorologist included two photos with her response, one of her with her new wig and another of her holding it in her hand.
Mock has been in the business for a decade, so she’s used to hearing feedback from viewers. Many of the reviews she gets are positive, a few are negative, and rarely are they about the quality of her work.
Instead of letting the comment get her down, Mock decided this would be a learning opportunity.
Mock decided to share the details of her diagnosis on-air two weeks before she started wearing a wig. She was diagnosed with stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer in May 2024, after finding a lump in her breast in February.
“I was told that it was growing rapidly and that for this type (of cancer) chemotherapy is the first and most effective step,” Mock said. Since then, she had been mentally preparing to lose her hair. By the time her hair began falling out in June, Mock had already considered wearing wigs.
“As soon as it started to fall, I held on for as long as I could and then I was like, ‘You know what? It’s not worth it,’ and I shaved my head,” Mock recalled. “It felt so liberating.”
After shaving the first section of her head, her husband helped her remove the rest of her hair. “That following Monday I showed up to work with a wig on. And it’s not ideal (it’s obviously a wig), but it makes me look normal to people,” she explained.
Most of the comments she received from viewers were supportive. They wrote to tell her how great she looked and wished her the best. “I’ve been overwhelmed with positive comments,” Mock said. “There haven’t been many negative ones, but when the negative ones come in, they absolutely stand out.”
A co-worker who saw the email before Mock responded told the person who sent it that Mock was undergoing cancer treatment. They never responded.
Now, Mock encourages viewers to carefully consider who they send their comments to before doing so. “The people you see on your local television are just that: people too. We are going through our own struggles, day in and day out,” she said.
“If our makeup and hair aren’t perfectly in place, have empathy. They don’t know what our morning was like, what our week was like.”
Instead, “focus on the work we are doing,” the meteorologist concluded.
