Pizza for Italy, Dracula for Romania and Chernobyl for Ukraine, Salmon for Norway. These were the images and captions used by a South Korean broadcaster to describe the nations at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympic Games.
MBC has since apologized for offending viewers, after several complaints that the visuals were “offensive” and “ridiculous”.
The channel had stated that it wanted to make it easier for viewers to understand the entering countries quickly but said that it was an “inexcusable mistake”.
During a press conference on Monday, the channel’s CEO, Park Sung-jae, apologized stating that MBC has “damaged the Olympic values of friendship, solidarity and harmony”.
“I bow my head and deeply apologise,” he said, adding that MBC would be putting “in all [their] effort to prevent another accident from happening”.
A Twitter thread drew attention to the unique descriptions where even civil unrest was not off the table.
When Haiti’s athletes walked on to the stadium, for instance, an on-screen caption described the country as one “with an unstable political situation due to the assassination of the president”.
And when the Syrian team entered, a caption read: “A civil war that has been going on for 10 years.”
MBC has been in trouble for this very same offense before after using similar images and captions at the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where they referred to Zimbabwe “as a country with deadly inflation”.
Sources: BBC, Londontimenews
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