Mothership lets a racial slur slip in a headline on its mobile browser

Well, not likely at 2:30 in the morning. At that point, a lot of places are down to one person cleaning things up, so to speak.

Somebody DID catch it in any case; just 35 minutes (well 5) too late.

 

You don't have a youngster making key decisions like that. That is my point.

 

SOME ONE did. That's why it was only on the site for 35 minutes.

That's the difference in the way things used to be and the way they are today. If someone wrote that headline at my newspaper it may sit in a slot queue for 45 minutes before slot gets to it and changes it and it never sees print. Today, in the online world, with hundreds of headlines written every day because you have stories and previews on just about every game played everywhere (as opposed to combining them into roundups or ignoring them altogether because of space), there is no way all of these stories see a "final edit" before they go online. Some do, sure. But most do not.

Heck, many newspaper stories go online without an edit. They will get "updated" with an edit and/or with more information when the copy editors come in. But I cannot tell you how many times I came into work at 4 p.m., saw a badly written story waiting to be published the next morning . . . which had already been online for several hours in its badly written version.

You do if you want headlines on every game played on every level in every time zone and updated 24/7. How many experienced slot people do you think are working at 3 a.m.?

 

After yesterday's game, they could've thrown a picture of Dirk on the website with the headline "Sour Kraut."

 

My point is that if normal procedure is that a headline is checked by somebody other than the headline writer, then proper procedure wasn't followed. If it was, did the editor who OK'd the headline get punished? I know that at many papers, there are headlines for quick stories put on websites that aren't checked by anybody else.

 

So why was the writer fired and bretos only suspended?

 

Because there's a pretty big difference between thinking up a "Chink in the Armor" headline and uploading it to the website, and doing a live interview asking if Lin has any flaws in his game, ad-libbing the phrase "chink in the armor" to ask it.

 

Not much difference at all. You're either smart/experienced enough to know better or you're not. But the guy who says it on TV gets to keep his job because he's the "talent." <snort> And the guy on the desk? Perfect fall guy.

 

There is an enormous difference between speaking extemporaneously in an interview and giving several minutes of considerable thought to something, then going with it anyway. Frankly, I don't think the anchor deserved the suspension at all. It should be obvious to anyone with a half a brain that the anchor was using a common idiom and in no way attempting any kind of play on words to make any kind of coded reference to Lin's heritage. Actual racism is about power and intent, not "words that sound the same, and therefor I take offense."