It's been 17 years since Jenna Bush Hager was made part of the NBC family, a year after her father George W. Bush left the White House.
As the story goes, in 2009, Jenna, now 44, was hired by TODAY to act as a regular contributor and anchor for their various shows.
© Getty ImagesShe'd built a relationship with them after appearing on the show as a guest while promoting her children's book Read All About It! with her mother Laura Bush.
Her profile on the show continued to grow over the years. In 2019, a decade after she joined, she started her own book club, Read with Jenna. And that same year, she was named the permanent co-anchor of the Fourth Hour with Hoda Kotb.
With Hoda's departure, Jenna now co-hosts the Fourth Hour with Sheinelle Jones, and on the latest installment of their daytime show, they discussed the impact of nepotism and "privilege" on her work ethic.
Jenna and Sheinelle, 48, discussed Homer Gere and Kaia Gerber's new Vogue cover, especially the latter's comments about being a child of famous parents in the entertainment industry (Kaia's mother is supermodel Cindy Crawford, Homer's parents are Hollywood stars Richard Gere and Carey Lowell).
Jenna, in particular, could empathize with Kaia's comments about wanting to "work harder" because of her name recognition, and said that she felt the same way when she first joined TODAY due to any perceptions of her hiring being due to her father's influence.
© Getty Images"I was on the show because my dad was president," she recalled, adding that "most people who have parents with privilege" will understand her feeling of wanting to "own" it, which Sheinelle opined was the reason why the people around Jenna admired her.
"We all work like crazy," Jenna said, then admitting that she'd been confronted with a comment of that nature just a couple months into her tenure on the show, while familiarizing herself with studios and using teleprompters.
"A correspondent said to me, 'We just thought they hired you because of your dad,'" she revealed. The mom-of-three recognized it as a "fear" that others in her position probably had, noting that a lot of the "mean things" people say about her online to this day stem from that place.
© Getty Images"I get it. And it's the thing that probably all of us can feel bad about," Jenna noted. "But then what we do to get over that is work like crazy. Work beyond, to the point that we work ourselves too much."
"I think I've done that now, but for a period, yes, there was that," she proudly shared, with her co-anchor pumping her up by saying that she absolutely had proven herself to be worthy of her position, with Jenna also affirming that same belief for her kids, revealing that her eldest daughter Mila was also not taking it lightly and had taken a job over the summer.
© Getty Images"It's one of those things where I feel lucky to be here, and I also feel like I needed to prove it."
