Fox Sports Cancels "The College Experiment" After Racist Video

Fox Sports yesterday said that it has canceled “The College Experiment” after the show “aired a segment that mocked Asian students who were filmed” on the USC campus, according to the AP. Fox Sports Senior VP/Media Relations Lou D’Ermilio in a statement said the segment that aired last week was “clearly offensive and inconsistent with the standards Fox Sports believes in, and we sincerely regret that it appeared.” D’Ermilio added that the “video was removed as soon as the network became aware of it” (AP, 9/7). In Boulder, Brittany Anas notes in the video, “Bob Oschack -- a comedian who labeled himself as an ‘investigative reporter’ for Fox Sports -- approached Asian students on the USC campus, asking them how they feel about CU and the University of Utah becoming the newest members of the Pac-12.” Oschack then appears “to mock students’ accents, corrects their grammatical mistakes in a seemingly condescending tone and pretends to mistake what they’re saying for the sake of laughs” (Boulder DAILY CAMERA, 9/7). AWFUL ANNOUNCING’s Ryan Yoder wrote the Fox Sports video is “about as discriminatory a three minutes of a video as you can see.” Yoder: “Who in their right mind at Fox Sports thought this was a suitable video to publish on their website. ... Only mild credit can be given to Fox Sports for pulling down the video and issuing an apology. These types of eye-opening mistakes can’t happen in this day and age, especially at a major sports media company like Fox” (AWFULANNOUNCING.com, 9/7). The COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW’s Ryan Chittum wrote, “This is one of the most overtly racist things I’ve seen from the Murdoch media -- and that’s saying something. Heads should roll” (CJR.org, 9/7).