Outrage and apology after NBC Olympics commentator hails Japan as role model for all Koreans, despite brutal occupation

Friday’s Opening Ceremonies for the Winter Olympics in South Korea were, by most accounts, spectacular.

NBC’s coverage of the spectacle, on the other hand, was considered hit and miss. Occasionally disastrous.

It wasn’t so much the hosts, Katie Couric and Mike Tirico, who annoyed critics, but rather the network’s analyst, Joshua Cooper Ramo.

Slate wrote that Ramo’s commentary amounted to bland trivia about Asia “seemingly plucked from hastily written social studies reports” – such as his observation that white and blue flags stood for North and South Korean unity. Variety compared his commentary to a Wikipedia article.

But Ramo’s big misstep came when he noticed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in the crowd and offered what he knew about the country’s history with Korea.

Japan was “a country which occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945,” Ramo said, correctly, though he did not mention that historians say the Japanese army forced tens of thousands of Koreans into sex slavery.