Imagine for a moment that the immense amount of content generated for news sources was streamed into your brain constantly. It wouldn't take very long before your mind exploded and you were left standing silent in an asylum like Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Most of that content is harmless: local stories about the oldest people in their towns, or any number of innocuous little articles. What's surprising is how little mistakes actually end up slipping past editors and making it into publication.
Such a "mix-up" occurred in the early morning on Saturday, after a tough loss for the New York Knicks. Newly crowned international sensation Jeremy Lin had been tearing the hardwood apart for the last seven games, with six of those games being his first starts in the NBA.
He even beat the NBA record for most points scored in a player's first fives starts. To compare, Lin had 136 points in his first five starts, and Michael Jordan had 116.
On Friday, however, he was shown to be imperfect. He turned the ball over nine times during a game against the New Orleans Hornets, which sealed New York's loss with certainty.
ESPN, in what seems like a rush to be the first outlet to have some sort of analysis on the loss, published one of the most bone-headed headlines in the history of sports journalism.
For about 30 minutes, the title of an article about Lin was "Chink in the Armor." Anyone familiar with Lin or Asian Americans in general knows that the title of that article contains an offensive slur.
Compounding the idiocy is the fact that Lin has been the brunt of discrimination and racism since his days at Harvard. Even before being a national name, his ethnicity has been used against him.
Even though his stats in high school were well above average, he was not offered a single sports scholarship. Lin said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: "I do think [my ethnicity] did affect the way coaches recruited me. I think if I were a different race, I would've been treated differently."
In college, morons continued trying to insult Lin based on his race. According to Lin's teammate during his time at Harvard, another Ivy League player used the same racial epithet against him. Bigoted shouts were common in his college ball career.
Some are inclined to say that it was an honest mistake, that having a "chink in your armor" is a common turn of phrase and that having it be associated with Lin was just a terrible misunderstanding.
Interesting, considering the phrase hadn't been used in an ESPN.com title in two years, and then it makes its grand resurgence with an article about an Asian American: a curious coincidence, indeed.
Although it's questionable whether or not the title was meant to be a racial slur or not, an intelligent writer would never use a title that could offend the majority of humans on earth, nor would a smart editor let it get into print.
ESPN has fired the writer, and suspended an anchor on its station for making a similar comment, but the editor who let that headline out the door has a similar responsibility. His job was to make sure that what got published was acceptable, and he failed miserably.
Mistakes are made every day, but a mistake this glaring and offensive is unacceptable.
