NBC Sports began their coverage of the final round of the U. S. Open Championship with a video feature that was supposed to “captured the patriotism of our national championship”. What they did was stir up a controversy by omitting a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance. Which portion? The words specifically omitted were ‘under God, indivisible’.
Here’s the video segment followed by NBC’s on air apology read by Dan Hicks (courtesy Newsbusters):
According to the United States Flag Code (4 U.S.C. § 4), the Pledge of Allegiance reads:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
NBC’s defenders are pointing out that the words “under God” weren’t added to the Pledge until 1954, which everyone should apparently consider an acceptable excuse for NBC’s decision to omit the words ‘under God, indivisible’ from the Pledge.
Nonsense… If you don’t like the words “Under God” being in the Pledge of Allegiance petition congress to remove them, simply ignoring them because you don’t like them smacks of the sort of foolish “we don’t want to offend anyone” political correctness that creates more problems then it solves.
Anyway here’s the text of NBC’s apology:
“We began our coverage of this final round just about three hours ago and when we did it was our intent to begin the coverage of this U.S. Open Championship with a feature that captured the patriotism of our national championship being held in our nation’s capital for the third time. Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out. It was not done to upset anyone and we’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”
Exit Question: Does anyone really believe that NBC accidentally left out the words ‘under God, indivisible’? I don’t, somewhere along the line someone in the chain command at NBC decided to cut ‘under God’ out of the segment. That segment didn’t air without someone reviewing it and approving it. That’s said I’m not inclined to attribute real malice or bias to NBC’s omission… Just foolish political correctness.
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