A major Chicago news station, WGN-TV, used a graphic of the yellow “Jude” badge Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust, on air. Even worse, it illustrated the station’s report on the start of Yom Kippur on Tuesday night. Oy.
Not surprisingly, the mistake quickly went viral on social media. As such, WGN realized their mistake and apologized Wednesday on air, stating:
“Major correction tonight: We couldn’t see this from the set here, but in our story about Yom Kippur we apparently used a symbol that is extremely offensive to the Jewish community. We mistakenly showed a symbol used by Nazi Germany to identify Jews. We deeply apologize for that error.”
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They also apologized again on Twitter, and on its website, where they stated:
“To our WGN News Viewers,
Last night we ran a story to recognize Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. The artwork chosen to accompany the story came from a graphics image bank.
Regrettably, we failed to recognize that the image was an offensive Nazi symbol.
We are extremely embarrassed and we deeply apologize to our viewers and to the Jewish community for this mistake.
Ignorance is not an excuse.
Please know we are reviewing our in house policies and changes have already been made to make sure a hurtful oversight like this never happens again.
Thank you for your understanding. We promise to do better.”
In case you want to see footage of the news report, you can check it out on Buzzfeed. While we know everyone makes mistakes, we do sincerely hope the news station learns from their mistake. And, you know, maybe catch up on their Holocaust history.
