Mistakes happen, but there’s no excuse for this deeply insensitive error.
Jewish people around the world were observing Yom Kippur this week, in what is the holiest day of the calendar. It is also known as the ‘Day of Atonement’ or the ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’. The main themes are repentance and atonement.
As such, you’d expect any reports of the day to be suitably respectful and tactful. But Chicago-based news station WGN-TV got things horribly wrong in the most offensive way possible.
Their report on Yom Kippur was accompanied with a graphic showing a yellow Star of David patch on a striped shirt – in other words, the uniform that Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps were made to wear…
The patch has ‘Jude’, or ‘Jew’, scribed upon it, and it was used by Nazis to identify Jewish people during their horrific persecution and mass-murder under Adolf Hitler.
Following complaints, the news station apologised unreservedly for the error, explaining that the offending picture came from a graphics image bank, and that they failed to recognise it as an offensive Nazi symbol.
