ABC Scrubs Kimmel Skit After Kid Suggests Killing Everyone in China
A Jimmy Kimmel Live! skit in which a child suggests that the government should "kill everyone in China" in order to resolve its debt crisis has sparked outrage and forced ABC to censor the clip and issue an apology.
"Kids Table," which originally aired on October 16th, features a panel of children saying the darndest things about current events ranging from the government shutdown to how you spell Barack Obama.
At one point during the skit (1:53 in the clip below), Kimmel asks the kids how the US should "pay China back" the $1.3 trillion it owes.
"Kill everyone in China," responds a bowl-cut tyke named Braxton.
The childish comment went mostly ignored by the American public, but plenty of Chinese Americans were livid, including the nearly 60,000 who signed a White House petition calling on Obama to investigate Jimmy Kimmel's Kids Table for employing "the same rhetoric used in Nazi Germany against Jewish people."
After the controversy made its way to the People's Republic, some took to Weibo to call for a mass protest outside the San Francisco offices of ABC.
The threat was apparently enough to convince ABC to scrub the clip from YouTube and issue a formal apology.
"We would never purposefully broadcast anything to upset the Chinese community, Asian community, anyone of Chinese descent or any community at large...our objective is to entertain," said ABC executive VPs Lisa Berger and Tim McNeal in a letter to pan-Asian-American PAC the 80-20 Initiative.
In addition to the apology, ABC said it will remove the segment from all future broadcasts of the episode, and will scrub it from any existing copies currently available online.
[There was a video here]
