Even the Bedouin people of the Sahara must surely know by now that Osama bin Laden has bitten the dust. So you’d think a sentence like “Osama bin Laden is Dead” wouldn’t pose too great a challenge for the press. But what countless newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and websites didn’t count on is how easily that simple sentence can become “Obama bin Laden is Dead.”
And we are not talking about small-time stations here. CNN, Fox, ABC and Sky all used the word Obama for Osama at one point or another.
The plague of slip-ups was so bad that one DC news anchor actually said:
…the President, telling the nation President Obama is in fact dead.
Of course some people are now saying that this is a media conspiracy to smear president Obama’s name, whereas the far more likely scenario is that Obama and Osama are two words that look and sound very similar.
Another reason could be that initially reports were simply that Obama was to make a special announcement and when that morphed into “Obama discusses Osama”, things got confusing.
Perhaps the simplest explanation of all was that news anchors and journalists had to add-lib for minutes at a time, having little to say, other than two words that rhyme, but should never be mixed up.
[Source: KTLA]
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