Last July an Asiana Airlines jet approached the San Francisco airport at too slow a speed and too low an altitude — three people were killed and more than 180 others were injured. Also four other people lost their jobs — three producers at local TV station KTVU and an intern at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Why the firings? Someone had given the station false names for the pilots aboard. They were told there were four —Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow. (According to this article there were three pilots — Lee Kang Kuk, Bong Dong Won, Lee Jung Min.) The producers had tried to verify the names with the NTSB, and the intern there corroborated the story. But as soon as the announcer gave the details on the air some people caught the hoax. The segment immediately went viral on YouTube (click here to see the clip). It received so much attention, along with the airline threatening to sue, that the station had to do something.
The argument was that the producers should have checked the names phonetically. Do you think that was fair? Also some people have called the prank racist. Do you agree?
It is naive to expect that the people who broadcast those names were not racist. This is not humour under the circumstances.
Why racist rather than a play on words? The joke may have been in poor taste (that’s the general feeling here), but the names were cleverly chosen. They weren’t that different from the names of the actual pilots, which is why the producers at the station didn’t catch the hoax until the announcer read the names over the air.
Its not humor at all, in my mind. From what I’ve read, the information came to the studio from a retired airline pilot. If that’s true, it was probably sent in as a horribly bad joke and the station, anxious to get the “scoop,” did a less than adequate job of vetting the information. Sure, they got someone at the NTSB to validate the info, but did they get that NTSB person’s name and title. Maybe if they had sounded out the “names” in advance, they would have caught it.
The joke, if that is what it is, is in terribly bad taste and obviously not “politically correct.” I don’t see it so much as racist humor aimed at belittling an ethnic group or nationality. Rather, it looks to me like a rather lame attempt at humor along the lines of the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First” skit.
I agree with you that it was an attempt to be funny and not meant to belittle an ethnic group. I read a number of articles on the topic before writing this post, and one fellow said mistakes by the producers shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re under a lot of time pressure, and they thought the source was reliable and they also checked with the NTSB. I wouldn’t want to have a job like that.
How “sad” and “very bad taste” – one mistake might have been permissible – of course it wasn’t a “mistake” was it. Glad that authorities did what was best and hope the people responsible – well I have nothing to add on the people in question!
I am puzzled by the fellow who submitted the names. He had been a reliable source in the past but obviously will never be trusted again. And who knows what the NTSB intern was thinking? He or she was rightly fired.
sad.
all the way around sad really.
we’re so glib now about everything.
as if even death . . . unless it’s at our door . . . is something to take lightly?
maybe they’ll wake up over this.
death is death. and in a terrible airplane crash . . . horrific. not funny.
nobody seems to put themselves in another’s shoes anymore.
i think we seemed to do that more once upon a time. not now.
I agree with Shaw on this one. I laughed at my mother’s funeral because something happened that she would have laughed at. It made me feel closer to her. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have trouble eating for at least six months after she died. Sometimes laughter is a way of coping with life.
Andy learned about this hoax in Joel Stein’s humor column in Time Magazine. It was a small part of the column, but he obviously thought it was funny. Andy laughed out loud when he told me about it.
Yes, I think the joke was clever and it gives me hope. In my Christmas letter this year I wrote:
I have mixed feelings. I think it was unfortunate the station didn’t catch it, but my first reaction when I read Stein’s column was to chuckle. I thought the play on names was clever. I also think the crash was sad and wish the broadcast hadn’t caused some people more pain. For me the distance in time and space makes a difference in my initial reaction. It is five months later, which made the incident more abstract.
Do you think Stein was wrong in using the incident in his column?
No I don’t think it was racist really. It wasn’t denigrating Koreans.
I don’t really see what you can do about getting stuff wrong in real time situations like that. I guess the best response is for the news readers to say they have been hoaxed.