Pervasive, persistent, puerile humor

In a conversation this morning, I was reminded of the prank played on the local news station five years ago after the crash of Asian Airlines Flight 214. It beggars belief.


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I never heard at the time just how this colossal error got to broadcast without being caught in process. The names, in hindsight, appear so blatantly wrong it seems incredible that they could have slipped through the multiple steps of fact-checking. However, I can understand the loss of situational awareness in reporting a fast breaking news event. Perhaps steps were skipped, perhaps there was a trolling mole in the process, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But what really happened?

I guess we still don't know. I had, at some point, heard that it was a couple of newsroom interns that did the names as a spoof and that it then accidentally got into the flow of news to the newsreader without being caught. But apparently that wasn't it.

KTVU received an enormous amount of flak, there were threats of lawsuits, people were fired. However, it appears, five years later, as if KTVU actually pretty much did everything we would expect of a fact-checking organization, other than maintaining situational awareness.

The sequence of events, as best I can tell from Asiana pilot names: NTSB intern 'no longer with agency,' report says, KTVU firings over airing of prank Asiana pilots’ names, Snopes, and Ex-Pilot Supplied Fake Asiana Airlines Names To KTVU, the sequence went something like this:

An ex-commercial pilot consultant to the news channel received a copy of the hoax names and passed it along in good faith to KTVU reporter Roland De Wolk.

Roland De Wolk passed the names to the newsroom to be checked.

In the fact-checking process, managing editor Michelle Toy (of Asian descent) raised questions because the names sounded Chinese when the airline was Korean operated.

Someone in the newsroom took the explicitly required step of enunciating the unfamiliar names but apparently without triggering any awareness on the part of the listeners.

The newsroom called the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to confirm the names of the flight crew.

An intern at the NTSB, thinking they were being helpful, confirmed to KTVU that the list was correct even though the intern had not validated the list.

The news reader announced the names without ever making the pivot from the phonetic pronunciation to the received meaning of the names.

Awareness only seems to have taken hold among the newsroom support staff after the live reading, and perhaps only after viewers began calling in.

And that is as far as the googling trail leads. Good intentions, reasonable processes, good adherence to the processes, and yet a hoax outcome.

Staff firings at KTVU and the NTSB seems to have assuaged aggrieved activists whose one note song is RACISM. However, this actually seems a pretty egregious injustice. As far as I can tell, the process was a decent one, the process was adhered to, and everyone executed their responsibilities appropriately. One failing was the misplaced eagerness to assist on the part of the NTSB intern, and the second failing was the incapacity of everyone to maintain situational awareness. Even there, Toy maintained enough to recognize the inconsistency of the implied ethnicities of the names, but without recognizing the spoken word implications.

Looks to me like no firings should have occurred at all.

But who started the process by getting the hoax list to the aviation consultant in the first place? I cannot find an answer to that. Apparently, as soon as news of the crash occurred, there were near instantaneous instances of inappropriate jokes on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Joke sharing about tragedies and inappropriate issues is age-old. When I started my career in the mid-eighties, I was aware of recently minted MBAs working at different consulting firms faxing one another lists of in-poor-taste jokes. Later that shifted to emailing. Now they are out there instantaneously and spontaneously on social media. Humor is a social reflex, appropriate or not.

Perhaps someone deliberately hoaxed the aviation consultant, perhaps they, like so many others, saw the list of names out of context and passed it along unthinkingly. At this point I guess we many never know.

But joke names, associated with tragedies or not, are a long standing gag of stage and screen. Some samples from the past few decades.

From Monty Python's 1979 Life of Brian playing on Roman-sounding names.


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Then there is Rowan Atkinson's public school roll-call, making fun of upperclass English family names.


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And just preceding the Asiana Ailines tragedy, there is this piece from Key & Peele riffing on the differences in African-American and mainstream naming patterns.


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We could go with the traditional SJW response to humor, puerile or otherwise.

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Or we can acknowledge that humor is one of the great gifts of humanity, whether well executed or not and whether appropriately executed or not.

I prefer the freedom of the latter over the cramped authoritarianism of those who wish to police what shall be be deemed permissibly funny.