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

Right, but if he's working on the mobile ESPN, does it just disappear into another ether? I don't know. I don't have a smart phone, so I'm in the dark a little bit here.

 

I don't know how you recognize that cakewalk can be offensive unless someone tells you... It's not obvious and it's one of those phrases that most of us have been hearing since we were kids.

I actually wrote a feature on a black basketball coach at a small college where I used the word in the lede. I had no idea and when I got an email the next day, I wanted to crawl into the fetal position and hide. Our copy chief talked me off the ledge saying that nobody on the desk mentioned it and 99 people out of 100 wouldn't notice. I called the PR director and he said, "Well, I doubt he's offended because he came in here with 30 copies of your section..."

 

There's a feature that was an APSE winner from several years back that has snafu in the lede.

It's a tremendous story, and I would bet just about anything that the writer and editor(s) had no idea what the word stands for, especially because it wasn't capitalized.

 

Sure, not today. But 100 years ago? I don't know the answer. I'm just wondering if there came a tipping point when young people didn't think of it in that way any more. The ESPN editor who made this mistake is 28. It is not plausible that he had not heard "chink" used in a derogatory fashion (and he doesn't seem to say that he had never heard it used that way, just that he didn't think about it), but it is possible, I think. I remember we had an Asian guy on our h.s. baseball team that his best friends on the team affectionately called "Gook." That's the one I grew up hearing. Not sure I heard "chink" until college at least.

 

Don't forget our infamous "uppity" discussion here, regarding Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Obama.

 

I've heard some strange ones over the years...

There was a paper up north that would not refer to the University of Mississippi as Ole Miss because "Ole Miss" was racist. Apparently an ASE put down that edict people gave up fighting him on it. Within a few days of that person leaving the paper, they reversed the policy and put Ole Miss in a headline.

The one I heard all the time when I lived down south was "Boy" which was used way too often, almost always by announcers, who were talking about people who were grown men. That always made me pretty uncomfortable.

 

The internal searches are often no good. I tried using google & putting espn in the search, and millions came up (though even after carving out the dates, some Lin ones still were there - I guess for updated headlines on the side). Apparently they went through this during the 2008 Olympics - in China!

http://www.faniq.com/blog/ESPN-Chink-In-The-Armor-Team-USA-Basketball-Headline-Blog-11274

 

So what would have been a better headline for Lin's poor showing?

Sayanora! Lin's sun is setting

Do the math! Lin's numbers are off

 

Knicks win streak over.

 

Lin commits wonton turnovers [/crossthread]

 

After the Raptors win, I remember reading in the talkback from one of the NY papers...

"With six you get eggroll..."

I'm sure ESPN is kicking itself for not using it...