It looks like someone at MBC is going to get in trouble for having a sense of humor:
Olena Kostevych and Bogdan Nikishin, of Ukraine, carry their country’s flag during the opening ceremony in the Olympic Stadium at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Friday, in Tokyo. AP-Yonhap
MBC went too far during its coverage of the Tokyo Olympic opening ceremony on Thursday, so much so that the broadcaster found it extremely challenging to make up for the mistakes.
Its hours-long livestream of the ceremony was filled with factual errors including nonsensical, scathing and discriminatory descriptions of some countries which sparked a furious online backlash.
When Chilean athletes marched during the opening ceremony, MBC used the image of the Routes of Santiago de Composte, a network of four Christian pilgrimage routes in northern Spain. MBC staff seemed to have confused the Chilean capital Santiago with the Spanish pilgrimage routes of the same name. It also used an image of the Atlantic Ocean, instead of the Pacific, for Micronesia, a tiny country consisting of 2,100 islands in the Western Pacific Ocean.
MBC left its viewers speechless with its inappropriate images for several countries. It used salmon for Norway and pizza for Italy. When the athletes of Republic of the Marshall Islands marched, the TV caption told viewers, “It was a nuclear test site for the United States.”
Some of the graphics used were insulting. For instance, the image of Bitcoin was used for El Salvador as if the TV station was trying to remind viewers of the Central American country’s adoption of the virtual currency as its official tender. An image of riots was used to represent Haiti.
According to the article President Moon is only doing this to try and promote his North Korea engagement policies during the Summer Olympics like he did during the last Winter Olympics:
President Moon Jae-in speaks by phone with new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on Sept. 24 at Cheong Wa Dae. / Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae
President Moon Jae-in’s rush to resolute serious issues with Japan before the Tokyo Olympic Games is not going as well as Cheong Wa Dae had hoped.
Moon named former four-term ruling party lawmaker Kang Chang-il as the next ambassador to Japan last month. It was the first time he had named a politician to the post, after first appointing Lee Su-hoon, an international relations professor, and then Nam Kwan-pyo, a career diplomat and one of the foremost experts on Japan at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Nam has served as the Korean ambassador to Japan since May 2019. It is considered rare for the envoy to Japan to be replaced less than two years after being appointed. Cheong Wa Dae said that sending a politician to the post has a particular meaning amid the deadlock in bilateral relations. “With the launch of the new Cabinet in Japan, it reflects the President’s determination to find a resolution to the problems in bilateral relations,” a senior presidential aide said. “Kang served as head of the Korea-Japan Parliamentarians’ Union and has built an extensive network in Japan. Based on this, we determined it would be more suitable to send a politician rather than a career diplomat.” (……..)
“One major factor in the Moon administration’s renewed push to improve relations with Japan is the possibility that doing so will allow the Tokyo Olympics to serve as a potential showplace for a breakthrough with North Korea,” Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, told The Korea Times.
You can read more at the link, but I don’t see the Japanese wanting to do the Moon administration any favors considering all the anti-Japanese policies and rhetoric they have pushed the past few years.
