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

What a disgrace.

 

Vitale spoke briefly on this during the Murray State-St. Mary's game tonight. Said he was embarrassed, ashamed, and disappointed, and that it shouldn't have ever happened. His points were quite obvious, but good to hearone of the network's biggest personalities speaking out about it.

 

I hesitate to suggest this, but could somebody -- whomever wrote the headline -- have thought this was some kind of appropos play on words?

This would be a horrible one, obviously, but I'm also beginning to think that there is getting to be so much more that is permissible in multi-media circles these days that that could possibly have been the case.

Or, maybe somebody really did think nothing of it. I doubt this, but someone who is not racist could actually have done that. A bad word or reference doesn't always necessarily occur to someone like that.

 

I don't want to revisit the "uppity" debate. Please?

 

I was going to post the same thing. Simply because this was one of those heads in which with any other player it would have been acceptable. Thus, there was nothing wrong with the words per se.

Tim Tebow has a couple of terrible games? Chink in the armor. How many of us have used that phrase --- orally or in print --- for a wide range of things? Like the "Daughter hopes Dad gets head job" headline . . . you don't always see what's there.

 

This crossed my mind too...but isn't that what an editorial structure is for? How many people saw it before it published, and how many ESPN employees saw it when it published before the responses began flowing in? It very well could have been an honest mistake, but someone should have caught it.

 

There's really no excusing it.

'Chink in the Armor,' after all, refers to a very specific weakness or vulnerability. It's meant in almost exactly the same way as 'Achille's Heel.' It's not meant as a generic reference to defeat. So it was misapplied even in that regard.

To work anywhere as an editor and not recognize the slur is absurd.

 

Lin-excusable

 

Well, perhaps his propensity for turnovers is the weakness. He did have 26 points and 12 rebounds.

Perhaps. But shit happens when working 200 mph sometimes. That same night one of our copy editors changed the lead game of the NHL roundup between editions from Ducks-Devils to Hurricanes-Sharks.

Just one problem: The headline was never rewritten. And so it went to slot . . . and wasn't noticed there, either (mainly because it was one of 8 stories in slot that were sent 60 seconds before deadline). Basically the terrible practice of "make sure and head is spelled correctly and send it" slotting. I noticed it purely by accident a few minutes later when looking at the page for an entirely different reason.

I've seen a lot of absurd things in 28 years. I wish my worst mistake was an ill-conceived headline that only appeared between 2:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. Just something for the "heads need to roll!" crowd to think about.

 

His turnovers hadn't hurt the Knicks in those previous 7 victories, so I'm not sure it's conceptually defensible in any case.

If you have to cite that specific weakness via cliche, 'Achilles Heel.'

How 'Chink' in this instance gets past anyone - in fact several layers of anyone - whose job it is to wrangle language really can't be excused no matter how rushed.

Explained, maybe. But not excused.

 

Dismissal.

frontrow.espn.go.com/2012/02/follow-up-statement-and-action/

 

Should they name names?

What did the anchor say, does anyone know?