JAKARTA - A major South Korean television station has apologized for using offensive images and captions to describe the countries participating in the Tokyo Olympics athlete contest last Friday night.
Restrictions related to COVID-19 caused the opening ceremony to turn into a delegation of athletes wearing masks in much smaller numbers than usual.
MBC - one of South Korea's largest national television networks - used images of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster for Ukraine, images of riots for Haiti and bitcoin promotional posters for El Salvador as each country entered the stadium to defile.
The TV channel apologized after the opening ceremony, saying "inappropriate images and captions have been used to describe a number of countries."
"We apologize to those countries including Ukraine and our viewers," the television said.
For a number of countries, the description given by Korean TV is more of a gastronomic nature, where pizza is for Italy, sushi is for Japan, and salmon is for Norway.
In its caption, Korean television described the Marshall Islands as "a former United States nuclear test site" and Haiti as a country "with an unstable political situation due to the assassination of its president".
Despite this Korean television apology, the images and accompanying captions sparked outrage online.
"They use whatever comes up first on Google," said one online user.
Another chimed in, "This is grave diplomatic impoliteness."
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