ESPN Under Fire for Linsationally Bad PC Headline About Knicks Loss “Chink in the Armor” (UPDATED)
ESPN got into a a linsational tub of hot water over a racially tinged Lin headline:
Intentional? As someone who worked for some years in the media both cabling (before internet) stories from abroad as a freelance correspondent for newspapers from Europe and Asia, and as someone who worked on the staff of two newspaper chais, I’d guess this is more due to an oversight error.
Someone either just used a dumb pun with racial connotations and it got by an editor or the editor didn’t think it would get the kind of reaction it got. And, if so, why didn’t the editor conclude that? The fact is a lot of the ethnic puns, ethnic humor even old mother-in-law jokes of the 50s are now not just a matter of “not PC” but truly offensive to many people.
This was was a no brainer — and the fact it ran suggests that is part of the reason it ran on the ESPN website, a website that, unlike TMV, has people constantly revising it, fine-tuning it, updating it and overseeing it.
Somewhere, for whatever reason, someone didn’t use (or have) a brain.
UPDATE: ESPN has not only apologized but says it fired the employee who wrote the headline and put an anchor who used the phrase on suspension for 30 days.
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