"Should NPR have apologized for 'dark continent'?"

[flowomo]

(snip)
Nine times out of 10, it is the adjectives that get journalists in trouble.
Most recently, an adjective got veteran NPR newscaster Jean Cochran into difficulty when she said on Valentine's Day that President Bush was heading to Africa to visit the "dark continent."
Almost immediately, a flurry of angry emails and phone calls came into NPR.
"I thought that we had wrested that comment along with 'colored' and other euphemisms for Africans or Afro-Americans," wrote one listener, summing up how others felt. "Could you please report my comments to NPR management? I almost drove off the side of the road to start a protest!!!"
"This is simply an outdated reference as well as being outrageously offensive," wrote another listener, Karrye Y. Braxton.
The copy, which had been approved by an editor, was pulled and Cochran agreed to never use the expression again.
"I had no idea the term would be found offensive," said Cochran, who joined NPR in 1981. "I will concede antiquated but I was unaware it was 'racist and irredeemable,' as one person put it in an email. I was floored. Am I insensitive? I don't know how that could be since I didn't know there was anything to be sensitive about. I understood the term to refer to the African jungle. It's a canopy blocking out the light. A geographical term."
(snip)

http://www.npr.org/ombudsman/2008/02/should_npr_have_apologized_for.html