A California TV station and NTSB intern are facing more fallout today, after an embarrassing mistake led a KTVU anchor to read on-air the (obviously) fake pilot names of Asiana Flight 214. That plane crash landed on a San Francisco runway on July 6th, killing three and injuring over 180 passengers.
We covered the whole ordeal here at Legal Insurrection.
The incident sparked outrage, as some asserted that fictitious names like “Captain Sum Ting Wong” and “Ho Lee Fuk” were racist and insensitive.
The TV station later apologized for the error, on-air and online, noting that it had first confirmed the names with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The NTSB followed suit with an apology, blaming the mistake on a summer intern who “acted outside the scope of his authority.”
Apparently the apologies weren’t enough. There has since been some additional fallout.
The NTSB summer intern has apparently been released from his job, according to NBC.
And Asiana Airlines says it intends to sue KTVU over the false report.
From CBS News:
Asiana Airlines announced Monday that it was going to sue a San Francisco TV station that it said damaged the airline’s reputation by using bogus and racially offensive names for four pilots on a plane that crashed earlier this month in San Francisco.[…]Asiana has decided to sue KTVU-TV to “strongly respond to its racially discriminatory report” that disparaged Asians, Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin said. She said the airline will likely file suit in U.S. courts.She said the report seriously damaged Asiana’s reputation. Asiana decided not to sue the NTSB because it said it was the TV station report, not the U.S. federal agency that damaged the airline’s reputation. Lee did not elaborate.
I’m not entirely certain how Asiana intends to try and prove that this KTVU report is responsible for damaging its reputation, but I guess we’ll see.
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