Unclear on the Concept
I expect everyone has seen the story about KTVU in Oakland being fooled into reporting that the pilots of Asiana flight 214 had names like “Sum Ting Wong” and “Wi Tu Lo”.
(Esteemed commenter George mentioned it here.) It’s difficult to picture that not a single person in the newsroom realized what the names sounded like out loud, but I suppose that these things happen. At any rate, KTVU has apologized, quite abjectly.
Still, Asiana is now considering suing KTVU and the NTSB for defaming both the airline and the pilots. Apparently they feel that bringing yet more attention to the crash is a clever strategy, and that being called silly names is damaging to their reputations in a way that killing three passengers is not.
I was thinking of writing a post on this myself.
Apparently it’s Negligent Corporations Behaving Badly Week.
MMA (Lac Megantic disaster railway company) CEO Edward Burkhardt defended cost-cutting by actually claiming that single-person overnight “crews” were SAFER than having multiple crew members because there are “fewer distractions”. One-person lab groups doesn’t fly for intro chemistry where students work with 0.00001 molar NaCl solutions, so why does Burkhardt think this is appropriate for trains carrying thousands of barrels of crude with a well-known history of catching on fire? He also apparently tried a photo-op with some of the townspeople right after the disaster happened and got viciously heckled. The man is a low-life scumbag who should go to prison.
BP takes the cake for this week though (and possibly the decade as well, although many executives at Tokyo Electric deserve public executions). For several weeks now, I’ve been changing the radio station every time I hear a man with a thick faux-Louisiana accent imply that things have been cleaned up in the Gulf thanks to the benevolence of British Petroleum. Starting last week – and I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this – BP launched a massive blame-the-victim campaign where the company claims it is being ravaged by spurious lawsuits and the unyielding greed of Gulf Coast residents whose lives were destroyed by its own negligence. At the same time, BP has gone over the head of the federal judge who has been presiding over the settlement (that BP agreed to in order to avoid trial) to appeal that very same settlement.
Wow. Just wow.Report
Given that the settlement was imposed by the moral equivalent of You Know Who, BP is actually supporting democracy by trying to weasel out of it.
Anyway, why wouldn’t BP appeal the settlement? Exxon’s repeated appeals got the Valdez settlement reduced from 5.5 billion to 1 billion, as well as keeping the suit tied up in the courts for almost 15 years.Report
My favorite IBD moment is when some columnist unequivocally stated that brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking would get the death panels if he were living under British socialized medicine. IBD refused to retract the story even after Hawking himself informed them that he is, in fact, British, and that he receives excellent care under the British national health care system.Report
That would be this one which now contains the brilliant disclaimer:
Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
“As God is my witness, I thought he lived in L. A. and commuted to Cambridge in that fancy wheelchair.”Report
Um, Hawking is a professor at Cambridge, you know, home of Harvard and MIT? Besides, he’s been on The Big Bang Theory, which is purely an American sitcom, which means he must be American. ^_^
I’m still laughing at the KTVU screw up. As the NTSB has found, most failures of that magnitude aren’t the result of just one mistake, but a series of mistakes, mis-communications, and unwarranted assumptions. They should interview the entire news crew and try to recreate the events that led to the epic segment.Report
In related news, This story from WXIA 11 News on people’s reactions to the Zimmerman verdict originally had a quote from a person named “Howie Felterbush.” They deleted it, but it lives on in the comments. My favorite was:
Do you have a photo of Howie Felterbush?
Because I’d be interested in seeing that.
But “Sum Ting Wong with article” was pretty good too.Report