Tokyo Olympics: Why South Korean channel had to apologize

Ground Report | New Delhi: Tokyo Olympics; Pizza for Italy, Dracula for Romania, and Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant for Ukraine. These were some pictures that South Korea's TV channel MBC ran to show athletes from different countries on the day of the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics.

MBC now has to apologize for this as people complained about it as 'disrespectful' and 'foolish'. The channel has apologized and said that its purpose was only to make people easily understand the names of the countries.

However, the channel also admitted that it was a mistake for which 'no excuse can be made'. In a statement issued on Twitter, MBC said it would investigate how these images and captions were selected. It is being said that the head of the channel can also apologize publicly.

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The controversy regarding this whole incident is still not over. On social media, people pointed out how this TV channel also made civil war and political crisis the identity of the countries.

For example, when athletes from Haiti took to the podium, TV screens described it as a country with "political instability following the assassination of the president". At the same time, when the Syrian athletes came, there was a caption on TV - where the civil war has been going on for 10 years.

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MBC has made the exact same mistake before. In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the TV channel described Zimbabwe as a 'country with terrible inflation'. After this, a fine was also imposed on the channel.

MBC -- one of the largest national television networks -- used images of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster for Ukraine, a riot for Haiti and a promotional bitcoin poster for El Salvador when each nation entered the stadium.

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