-By Warner Todd Huston
The Chicago Sun-Times has apologized for a headline pun reporting on the Asiana 214 airliner crash that seemed racist to some Asians.
The Sunday Sun-Times Front Page
Asiana flight 214 crashed in San Francisco on Saturday, June 6, but in its front page report on the crash, the Chicago Sunday Sun-Times blared a headline that read “FRIGHT 214.”
The Asian American Journalists Association was not amused by the play on words wondering if the Sun-Times understood that changing the “L” in “FLIGHT” to an “R” could easily be perceived as a play on the stereotypical difficulty of some Asians to pronounce the letter “L.”
“While we at the Asian American Journalists Association are willing to give the Sun-Times the benefit of the doubt, the headline used to accompany the paper’s coverage was certainly unfortunate. An editor should have caught the racially tinged wording,” said AAJA’s Bobby Calvan in a public post on the organization’s website.
The Sun-Times quickly apologized for the punny headline saying, “There was nothing intentional on our part to play off any stereotypes. If anybody was offended by that, we are sorry.”
“We were trying to convey the obviously frightening situation of that landing,” said the paper’s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Jim Kirk.
While accepting the paper’s apology, the AAJA also complained of a lack of diversity in the media today.
“If the Sun-Times’ copy desk is like many others in newsrooms across the nation, it probably lacked the diversity of voices on staff that might have questioned the appropriateness of the headline,” the AAJA’s Calvan wrote.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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