ESPN Fires "Chink In The Armor" Headline Writer

I'm so racist it never even occurred to me that "chink" was a slur against the Chinese!

The ESPN editor fired Sunday for using "chink in the armor" in a headline about Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin said the racial slur never crossed his mind - and he was devastated when he realized his mistake.

"This had nothing to do with me being cute or punny," Anthony Federico told the Daily News.

"I'm so sorry that I offended people. I'm so sorry if I offended Jeremy."

The headline - "Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin's 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets" - appeared on ESPN's mobile website at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and was removed by 3:05 a.m.

Yeah, I don't believe that. "Chink in the armor" doesn't really make a great deal of sense here. When I think armor I think defense. Lin's errors were committed on offense. Seems an odd expression in that context.

Generally I would say that this is no victory for "us," but rather yet another scalp for the headhunting cannibals of political correctness, but here the writer wasn't speaking on his own time, and didn't appear to just "slip up."

In addition, there have been so many "ha ha, a Chinaman is good at basketball, isn't that funny" jokes -- far more of them made privately than have made it on to the airwaves or website headlines -- that it's just impossible to imagine this guy never heard a one of them, and therefore had no idea what the problem was.

He used his employer to make a cruddy joke, and exposed them to embarrassment.

For what? I don't know if he's a "racist" but it seems like he has very poor judgment.

He's also one of those guys who's pretty sure he's super-clever and funny but in fact is a perfect dunce. A dangerous combination -- arrgoance and incompetence. Imagine if we had that kind of a combination in the White House!

If you can't trust the guy -- if you have to babysit him and clear every single thing he writes before allowing it to be published -- he's a lot more trouble than he could possibly be worth.

Representative Judy Chu: The "C-Word" Is Appalling and Just Like the N-word. Now comes the best part of any PC offense story-- people pushing it to score points and advance a particular agenda.

Correction: ESPN, not Sports Illustrated, ran the headline.

posted by Ace at 02:38 PM

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