I have yet to offer my analysis on the recent Asiana crash, but it will be forthcoming and will focus not on the crash itself, but on the way the media reported on it: irresponsibly in many cases.
With the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and the race to get news out before anyone else, even at the expense of its accuracy, mistakes are bound to be made. Some are more egregious than others:
Wow, just wow.
- Sum Ting Wong
- Wi Tu Lo
- Ho Lee Fuk
- Bang Ding Ow
This news footage above is not a joke, folks. The names are not even Korean names. Kind of makes you wonder about the rest of the news we hear…
The news station issued the following disclaimer later in the broadcast:
Sure…
They’re now claiming that a summer intern was the cause of the joke.. Even if that is true, you would think that they would check their data before sending it out to the mainstream news orgs..
NTSB intern:
Indeed–here is the press release:
http://www.ntsb.gov/news/2013/130712.html
Reminds me of my intern days on the Hill. Interns hold a lot more power than most think…
It’s not racism but stupidity. Just say the names once to yourself and you realize something is off. This is what journalism has become unfortunately.
Unbelievable. I almost never watch local news anywhere, but I liked the coverage provided by the KTVU feed online on the day of the crash.
No news source is immune from this kind of thing. What happened to fact checking?
I could see maybe one of those names by itself getting by, but how could anyone see all four together and not see it? That’s the amazing part.
All these names are holdovers from old-time racist jokes that were targeted against Chinese immigrants. Asiana is a Korean airlines, with Korean pilots, with completely different name structure and sounds. I realize not everyone is famaliar with Asian name constructs, but the fact that this made it into a professional news broadcast is unbelieveable.