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KTVU Gets Pranked on Asiana Pilot's Names

landtuna said:
http://news.yahoo.com/no-racist-asian-names-arent-really-pilots-asiana-210121987.html
Click to expand...

Astonishing.

And in the Bay Area, which has a huge Asian population.

At least three people (producer, font operator, anchor) had to see those names before they got on the air. And even if it was added to the prompter after the newscast began, that's where any anchor not on autopilot, with even a shred of critical thinking, pauses, looks at the names and says "I'm sorry, folks, but it appears the folks in the control room have been pranked. Folks in the control room, please take the graphic off the screen now. I'm not reading them on the air. And again, to our viewers, our apologies. In other news..."
 
It is not the NTSB's role to confirm airplane manifests. NTSB may blame a rogue intern, but it is still KTVU's fault, and incredibly humiliating.

In my newsroom, those names would have passed through multiple hands before reaching air:

-Reporter or assignment editor who had been talking with the NTSB daily.
-Producer who wrote the copy
-Graphic artist who made the full screen
-Anchor who should have read the copy ahead of time, in order to pronounce those names correctly

We were fooled once, on the name Tess Steckle. I've seen Mountain Dix on a competitor's air. But not only are the Asiana names so blatantly phony, they appear in the order of occurrence during the crash (something's wrong, we're too low, holy f&ck, *crash*)
 
Those names were so blatantly obvious, though I went to school with Anita Mann, James Hsu and his brother Ken.

Since he went by James not Jim and his brother went by Ken not Kenny, the name Hsu didn't cause them much grief).
 
TheRob said:
It is not the NTSB's role to confirm airplane manifests. NTSB may blame a rogue intern, but it is still KTVU's fault, and incredibly humiliating.

In my newsroom, those names would have passed through multiple hands before reaching air:

-Reporter or assignment editor who had been talking with the NTSB daily.
-Producer who wrote the copy
-Graphic artist who made the full screen
-Anchor who should have read the copy ahead of time, in order to pronounce those names correctly
Click to expand...


And I think that was pretty much the case at KTVU..

At a minimum, the producer and the font operator saw it and weren't engaged in nearly enough critical thinking.

If the "confirmation" came after the newscast started, it's possible the anchor was seeing it cold.

KTVU's latest explanation is that they never read the names aloud, even when talking to the intern they thought was an official at the NTSB. The station says they spelled the names and asked if the spelling was correct. They also say they didn't attempt to determine the rank of the person they spoke with at the NTSB.

If all of that is true, KTVU is basically telling us that they are incompetent and ignorant of basic journalistic practice (start with not reading the names aloud to figure out whether you might want to put phonetic pronouncers into the copy for the anchor). To say nothing of being completely out of touch with the massive Asian population and cultural influence in the Bay Area. Apparently, KTVU employs people (including a veteran anchor) who can't tell real Korean names from a bad Bart Simpson joke.
 
The NTSB now says that the names originated with KTVU and that the intern who overstepped his bounds "acted in good faith, did not realize the names were offensive and was trying to be helpful."

Hey, kid...you do that by transferring the call to someone who knows something, not by confirming the spelling of names that can't be confirmed because they aren't real.
 
Does the NTSB (or KTVU for that matter) hire interns or news readers who don't have a degree in something that indicates they can read and interpret? Anyone who read an earlier story about the crash should have known there were Korean pilots and those were definitely not Korean names.

And unless the intern who "verified" the names was looking at the real name list they didn't get a lot out of their education either.

I used to watch KTVU as an independent and can't help but wonder whether their current affiliation with Fox had something to do with this.
 
michael hagerty said:
Apparently, KTVU employs people (including a veteran anchor) who can't tell real Korean names from a bad Bart Simpson joke.
Click to expand...

This doesn't sound like something many TV journos would know how to do. Maybe SF is a special case because of the high concentration of Asians, but to my midwestern ear these names sound like possible names of various Asian nationalities. As in, I wouldn't be surprised if there really is a Wei Tu Low somewhere on earth -- but that doesn't mean I excuse KTVU for not realizing that these four names together were a hoax.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
michael hagerty said:
Apparently, KTVU employs people (including a veteran anchor) who can't tell real Korean names from a bad Bart Simpson joke.
Click to expand...

This doesn't sound like something many TV journos would know how to do. Maybe SF is a special case because of the high concentration of Asians, but to my midwestern ear these names sound like possible names of various Asian nationalities. As in, I wouldn't be surprised if there really is a Wei Tu Low somewhere on earth -- but that doesn't mean I excuse KTVU for not realizing that these four names together were a hoax.
Click to expand...

Speaking as someone who's been a journalist for more than 30 years, the job is about learning things...daily. Any journalist who isn't a rookie and hasn't taken the time to familiarize him/herself with the differences in Asian names from different countries on the most basic level isn't trying.

In San Francisco, where you encounter those names on a daily basis, it's inexcusable. It'd be like being fooled by "Jose Canusee" or "Ricardo Cabeza" in Phoenix.
 
michael hagerty said:
Speaking as someone who's been a journalist for more than 30 years, the job is about learning things...daily. Any journalist who isn't a rookie and hasn't taken the time to familiarize him/herself with the differences in Asian names from different countries on the most basic level isn't trying.
Click to expand...

Right. I agree that journalists should educate themselves about what they cover, but don't think it is likely journalists will learn much about Asian names if they're working in the rust belt. I certainly did not.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
michael hagerty said:
Speaking as someone who's been a journalist for more than 30 years, the job is about learning things...daily. Any journalist who isn't a rookie and hasn't taken the time to familiarize him/herself with the differences in Asian names from different countries on the most basic level isn't trying.
Click to expand...

Right. I agree that journalists should educate themselves about what they cover, but don't think it is likely journalists will learn much about Asian names if they're working in the rust belt. I certainly did not.
Click to expand...

If you're producing or anchoring a newscast and Kim Jong Un is threatening to launch nukes from North Korea, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is making an unfortunate gay joke at an international summit and Shinzo Abe is meeting with President Obama to discuss trade with Japan (all of which has happened in the last 90 days), that should give you a rough idea of the basics. By the time I was 5 as a kid in L.A., I knew "Wong" was Chinese and "Imada" was Japanese (it helped to be friends with Barry Wong and Jeff Imada, I admit).

And this didn't happen in the Rust Belt...it happened in the Bay Area, which is almost one-quarter Asian, and where six cities have populations that are more than 50% Asian.
 
While I worked at WCTV, one of the newer reporters interviewed an FSU student who gave his name as "Haywood Jablomy." A lower-third graphic had been prepared with this name, and thankfully the director caught it (yelling "hell no!"), ordering the chyron op to go to the next super. The director was ragging the reporter about "Haywood" for days after.
 
M.J. said:
This wasn't a first for KTVU either. This one happened in mid-2006:

http://blog.rifftrax.com/2008/11/25/move-over-hugh-jass/

What I have yet to see anywhere is someone interviewed with the last name Hunt, first name Mike. That said, there is a real person by that name, who happens to be a well-known lawyer in Perth, Australia, though his website refers to his first name only as Michael.
Click to expand...

And all this on a station that RUNS "The Simpsons".
 
The Cable Shopping Networks have been pranked too. I heard a story that in the early days of CVN - The Cable Value Network (a predecessor of both QVC and ValueVision) that a caller wanted to give a birthday shout-out to his friend John Mehoff whom people called Jack. Well back then they couldn't put callers on the air and the host said on-air "Happy Birthday Jack Me-Off"
 
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