BOULDER Colo. — Fox Sports said Wednesday it canceled a show that aired a segment that mocked Asian students who were filmed on the Southern California campus.
Fox Sports Network spokesman Lou D’Ermilio said in a statement that last week’s segment was “clearly offensive and inconsistent with the standards FOX Sports believes in, and we sincerely regret that it appeared.” He said the show that aired the video, “The College Experiment” would be cancelled effective immediately.
The Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, Colo. reported about the video and the network issued an apology. The video shows a comedian approaching Asian students at USC and asking them to welcome the universities of Colorado and Utah to the Pac-12 Conference. The comedian tells the students to give the new Pac-12 members an “all-American welcome” and then mocks students’ accents.
D’Ermilio says the video was removed as soon as the network became aware of it. He said “there was a breakdown in our internal processes” and that the network is taking steps to make sure an “incident of this nature is not repeated in the future.”
“We sincerely apologize to the Asian and Asian American communities, and to everyone else who found this video offensive, and again to the University of Southern California, which was the unfortunate setting for the video,” D’Ermilio said.
University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Darryl Maeda, who saw the segment, told the newspaper that the piece relies on stereotypes of Asians as “perpetual foreigners.” The interviewer appeared to seek students for whom English is not their first language, he said.
“This is demeaning to millions of Asian Americans who have put down deep roots in the United States, claim English as their language and root vigorously for their favorite sports teams,” Maeda said.
Colorado’s football team hosts USC on Nov. 4. Colorado and Utah entered the Pac-12 in July.
