Asiana Airlines may sue over racially offensive names

Asiana Airlines is considering a lawsuit against the National Transportation Safety Board and station Oakland TV station KTVU after Friday’s newscast.

An intern working for the NTSB mistakenly confirmed culturally insensitive names for the airline pilots involved in the tragic accident last week. It is not clear if the intern has been relieved of duty.

"The reputation of the four pilots and of the company had been seriously damaged by this report. The company is reviewing taking legal action against both KTVU-TV and the NTSB," a spokesman for Asiana Airlines told CNN .

The fake names could easily be interpreted as phonetic spellings of Asian-stereotyped speech.

KTVU and the NTSB have apologized.

That might not be enough.

“We fail to understand how those obviously phony names could escape detection before appearing on the broadcast and were spoken by the news anchor,” Paul Cheung, a spokesman for Asian American Journalists Association, told the Associated Press . “We urge KTVU to conduct a thorough review to prevent similar lapses.”

Image: By Alexander Novarro (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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