Charlotte Hornets radio play-by-play man John Focke has been suspended indefinitely after he used a racial slur on Twitter during a Jazz-Nuggets game. Focke deleted the tweet and said it was a typo.
Focke, who’s in his first season calling games, said he wanted to tweet out the word “Nuggets” when he typed the n-word instead
He followed that up with another tweet: “I made a horrific error while attempting to tweet about the Denver-Utah game. I don’t know how I mistyped. I had (and have) no intention of ever using that word. I take full responsibility for my actions. I have been sick to my stomach about it every since. I’m truly sorry that this happened an I apologize to those I offended.”
Be especially sure that spell check is disabled in your device…sometimes it replaces the word you intended to type with one that completely destroys the meaning of what you wanted to say!. I guess that some talented computer programming genius could write a program that could filter out a list of words in any stream or document to avoid this sort of thing too…but that is not me since the problems are more often words replaced by the spell check and I am not a genius level programmer.
Best advice to all air talent people and anyone else who is in the public eye (or ear): Stay off the social media! In these hyper-politically correct times, one tweet or Facebook posting can easily be a career killer.
Social media is part of the job for anyone in a position like that. Staying off it isn’t an option – they won’t have a career.
This gets ridiculous. A person mistypes a word — and is suspended. Yet, that word is used all of the time in music videos and by individuals themselves. A program was run on HBO this week-end and the word was used throughout. It’s a slang word. It should not be the end of the world or the end of a person’s career.
If it was truly a typo, I agree with that part of it.
However, the choice of some black people to reclaim that word – I say some because not all black people agree with that choice – does not make it okay for non-black people to use the word. It is being used in very different ways. (This isn’t limited only to the black community; many other marginalized groups have reclaimed words, with some members not in favor of that, and again, it’s never okay outside the group.) And if it’s somehow difficult for a white person to go through life without using the word, well…they should look at why that is.