A South Korean broadcaster has apologies for depicting Italy with Pizza for, Dracula for Romania and Chernobyl for Ukraine at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympic Games.

According to BBC, channel’s CEO Park Sung-jae has apologised, saying MBC had “damaged the Olympic values of friendship, solidarity and harmony”. 

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The CEO said it wanted to make it easier for viewers to understand the entering countries quickly but said it was an “inexcusable mistake”.

Sung-jae said he bows his head and deeply apologises, adding that the channel will put all effort to prevent anything like this from happening in the future.

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Freelance journalist Raphael Rashid started a Twitter thread to draw people’s attention to these “unique” descriptions where even civil unrest was not off the cards.

The channel described Haiti as the country “with an unstable political situation due to the assassination of the president” when Haiti’s athletes walked on to the stadium.

And when the Syrian team entered, a caption read: “A civil war that has been going on for 10 years.”

A Twitter user wrote, “Did they literally just pick whatever the first picture was that popped up on Google when they did an image search for the country?”

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Others started trying to guess what images would be used for different countries.

The channel has done similar things in the past and has been in trouble. It was fined after using similar captions and images at the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It had then referred to Zimbabwe “as a country with deadly inflation”.

Tokyo Olympics began on July 23 after one year of delay due to the coronavirus pandemic.