As per yeinjee, MBC has fired their news anchor, Moon Ji-ae after she was criticized for laughing at the end of a live news broadcast on January 7.
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That’s Not Funny . . .
This entry was written by R. Elgin, posted on January 17, 2008 at 1:10 pm, filed under Asides. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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11 Comments
That’s silly. A news anchor’s job is to sell the stories, that’s all. Who’s naive enough to think that the emotions they are trying to convey are real? They should watch American news. One minute the news anchor looks like his dog has been run over by a car and the next he’s smiling.
Well, that’s unfortunate of her. Could have put her mind on whatever it is that she thought funny then at a better time.
In the local news, anchors here in the states laugh all the time. Should of been given a warning first?
Koreans appears to prefer stoic, absolutely emotionless news reporting, judging from the normal anchor’s delivery here. Dan Rather has nothing on the guys over here. There’s a fairly new woman anchor on one channel,maybe KBS, and even she comes off serious and manly, with voice deeper than most women I’ve encountered in Korea. Back in the States, all the phony joking and personal banter seems strange after watching Korean news for a while. I suppose its just cultural preference. And, we can’t forget the authoritarian legacy in Korea either. Park and Chun used the news to legitimate their rule - there was an expression about news reporting under Chun, something like “ding dong ding, Chun Doo Hwan” about how following a chime signally the start of the news program, the first story was always about Chun, and what he did that day. So, of course, the anchors had to be deadly serious when presenting news about Chun. To see the effect of authoritarianism, just take a look at the presentation style of North Korean news announcers. Geez, they are so wound up, it looks as if they’re giving an evangelical sermon, and actually, wasn’t Kim Il Sung’s father a Protestant Minister in Pyongyang? I sometimes wonder if they didn’t intentionally adopt that style. Too bad they completely divorced the style from the substance.
This was more to do with placating China.
40 people including 12 Chinese nationals died in the fire (all of them ethnic Koreans) and the Chinese netizens were flooding the internet with angry accusations of Koreans making fun of China (forgetting that more Koreans died in the fire).
That’s too bad, although personally I am biased toward French news anchors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1G-3laJJP0
CM, this would be par for the course in the Korean Government’s cowardly behaviour regarding China. If this is the case, it is truly sad.
#4 you should check out the North Korean news readers delivery the news on behalf of the Korea workers party!
I would prefer to see a greater effort to fire - and imprison - the corrupt safety officials and dodgy company management responsible for such tragedies.
The anchor’s ill-timed laughter was perhaps in poor taste, but was almost certainly accidental and devoid of any malicious intent.
So, there seems to be a confusion here… this was a nationally broadcasted news, right? So the newsroom mistake like that would have been inappropriate even in the States. Those kind of lighthearted things can be seen in the local news, morning news ’shows’, craptacular pundit shows, and the CNN/MSNBC neverending coverages… but not in news program like ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News.
Bizarre. Firing an anchor for a brief, stifled laugh seems harsh, but then young female anchors don’t have a long shelf life anyway.
That Frenchwoman’s wardrobe rocks, save for the occasional tacky, spangly stuff. Now I want a chartreuse leather jacket with zippers. Small-chested women are lucky. They can flash some understatedly sexy skin in unbuttoned shirts without looking porno.