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I’m not really sure what I said that doesn’t track for you?
Does it not seem like a stupid and career-risking thing to say? 
I also say:
But again, news readers aren’t necessarily the brightest people. Also, when on live TV and living in the moment maybe the unconscious comes out with what’s being held in?
From the example you give,
I know a manager who had a potential employee throw out racial slurs in a job interview (probably thought it was alright since it was just white guys in the room).
…that seems pretty much the same case I’m describing as a possibility here. It seems that the interviewee you mention was a) not that smart, and b) would not have done it if he knew it would threaten the job he wanted.
If a newsperson doesn’t realize that saying this on-air will threaten their job, then they’re definitely stupid. Which, as I already said, is entirely possible. Maybe even likely.
And to be clear, none of that excuses it.
Like others have mentioned, I’ve said the phrase “Martin Luther King” (with or without the “Dr.” and “Jr.”) many times, and his last name has never somehow “accidentally” come out “coon”. It makes me wonder what’s rolling around in that news anchor’s head.
It reminds me of the time my wife (who’s African-American) and I were staying in a small town in Idaho on vacation while visiting a national monument, and went out to breakfast. This white guy in the opposite corner audibly said to the waitress that he wanted “another plate of coon cakes.” We didn’t think that was an accident, and neither did the cashier we complained to (for what it was worth).
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He might very well be racist, but calling him out this time might be a strategic error because it causes people who wouldn’t normally defend racism to defend him.
Compare this with the MAGA cap high schoolers, where their intentions were clear. That was clear, intentional aggression and can’t be reasonably defended.
Well - unless the next word on the prompter is Jr/Junior. In which case it could be a simple “spoonerism” type mix-up of adjacent words. But if so, one would expect the next word to come out of their mouth to be a likewise garbled “Jinior”
That’s a demerit for you, mister/missy.
Go read Letter from a birmingham jail and rethink your views a bit this MLK day.
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If it had happened only once, I could almost see hand-waving it away as a “mistake.”
This is the 3rd time a weatherman has mispronounced Dr Martin Luther King’s name as a racial slur, and two of those times were very recently.
That’s not some weird ‘coincidence.’
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Man, one of the weirdest “racial tension” moments I ever had was in Prineville Oregon.
Nothing confrontational or violent, but in the 80’s, my Mom (Japanese), Dad (German/English mix), and myself (the delightful blend) stopped on a roadtrip in a Burger King of all places.
You know that moment when the protagonist in a movie goes into a bar and all the small talk stops, and the jukebox record scratches. Yeah, it was like that. All small talk stopped immediately, and everyone was just staring at my Mom and I. The immediate silence was super weird. I guess it wasn’t common to see Asian people in that part of the state at that time.
But this was in the 80’s, and my Aunt (Mom’s sister) who lived in Bend (before it got big) joked that the only Asians in town were her, and the couple who owned the Chinese restaurant. Now look at it.
It amazes me that with such rapid changes over a only a couple of decades (not to mention a lifetime), that people just don’t get it, and insist on burying their heads in the sand and being fearful racist asshats.
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To that point… could this incident, and the previous, possibly be real-life cases of “Anchorman,” in which the teleprompter contained the incorrect text and the newscaster stumbled as he read it and then tried to correct it?
(I’m sure it’s not, as I can’t think of a reason why these guys wouldn’t immediately call out what actually happened, but still…)
Added to the fact that it was a regularly used epithet aimed at Dr. King back in the 60s too…
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That’s what makes it so unlikely that it was “just an innocent slip of the tongue.”
Many of us have tried saying MLK’s full name rapidly and repeatedly, to see if such a ‘mistake’ could occur naturally… and the result has largely been that the mouth formation of the two words are different enough that we haven’t had the same issue.
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This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a point like this being made, and it strikes me as very twisted. It’s the equivalent of “Don’t arrest thieves, because it just makes them deny being thieves!”
I don’t have a mind control ray and if I did I wouldn’t be using it to get people to defend racism. It’s unfortunate that other people make that choice, but that’s them, it’s not me.
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I hate it when this happens, but this is a common linguistic error called phoneme anticipation - I don’t think he was inserting the “Luther” into King (that would be a perseverance error) so much as anticipating the “oo” sound in Junior.
It’s POSSIBLE the guy is a horrible, hateful racist who always refers to MLK Jr. by a racial slur when hanging out with his buddies, but it’s also possible that he’s an OK person who made a common mistake. It happens to everyone, even to announcers.
We’ve covered this upthread. Trying reading the thread before throwing in the same old excuses that have already been tried…
And welcome to boing boing, comrade.
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I did read all the comments, thanks for the awesome suggestion! I just didn’t see anyone who seemed to know the actual terms for for this kind of speech error, or anyone who considered it a legitimate phenomenon that actually is well documented by neurolinguists.
And thanks for the super warm welcome! Glad to be here.
Nope, it really isnt. Any other name, other under many circumstances, that excuse might fly; but in this particular instance (and the one before that just a week or so ago) I have a hard time believing it’s harmless or not indicative of the individual’s inner-dialog.
Once could be happenstance, twice might be coincidence, thrice is a pattern.
This is the 3rd time a weatherman has ‘mispronounced’ MLK to say ‘coon’ on camera.
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Also this whole topic.
At this rate we might have to create a Freeze Peach-like reference topic devoted only to on-air talent who mispronounce MLK’s name in a racist manner that was around when he was alive.
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I mean that phoneme mix-ups are a common speech error. The most common.
We have trod this argument already, is my point. The two words are distinct enough that it seems unlikely to many of us as an explanation, doubly so given the history of that name being used regularly from the 1960s to warrant our skepticism as that being the most likely explanation for the “slip up.”
And as @Melz2 noted, this is becoming a repeated pattern once again.
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