SYDNEY – Australian Broadcasting Corporation news readers and reporters today continued to mispronounce the epicentre city of the coronavirus raging through China as “WOO!-HARN!”, giving full flavour to their shouted variety of Drongo English while leaving viewers of Chinese descent shaking their heads in wonder as to how trusted media professionals could so badly mangle otherwise mellifluous Mandarin language tones.
The news readers and reporters, shitting themselves with excitement over the possibility that the Coronavirus 2020 epidemic will overtake the Australian bush fires as the top tragedy in the world, were apparently given a directive by ABC management to “just go ahead and stick an ‘R’ in there, too, in order to lend dramatic weight to the nightly news broadcast.
“What we’ve been hearing from our viewers is that they’re perfectly OK with [Wuhan] being pronounced with the Native American Indian exclamatory ‘WOO!’ as the first syllable and the ‘HARN!,’ with a hard ‘R’, as the second syllable – as though we pulled an entirely new word straight out our arseholes and added sounds that don’t even really exist in other languages except our own,” said Wayne “Nobby” Bludgerington, the head of programming for ABC.
“Mate, look – we told ’em, yeah? Just go ahead and defo find your comfort zone with [Wuhan] and give it a good whack and let’s see how she flies,” Bludgerington added. “But the fact is since none of our anchors or reporters have ever actually been to China or done hard yakka there, they shouldn’t also be expected to enunciate Chinese place names even remotely correctly.”
ABC also said its news anchors and reporters would continue to freely mispronounce former US President Barack Obama’s name as “BARE-och oh-BAM-err,” misidentify North Korean President Kim Jong-un as Korean-American actor Ken Jeong and lend credence to the theory that Crocodile Dundee now serves in the Vietnamese government as Secretary of the Interior.