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Opinion: You Give Us 22 Minutes, Some of Us Will Give You ... What?

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Can anyone explain why a few KFWB news anchors seem to have such a hard time pronouncing some common names in the news?

Over the months I’ve heard names of major streets and freeway exits mispronounced, ditto the names of public figures. Just today, Sunday, it was ‘Nouri al-Maliki,’ the prime minister of Iraq, rendered as ‘al - Ma - LEE - kee,’ instead of ‘al - MAH - li - kee.’ What prompted this blog post was hearing, just a while ago, fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s name pronounced ‘BERN - a - kee,’ dropping the second ‘n’ entirely, instead of ‘Ber - NAN - kee.’

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It’s not as if these were some guys or gals off the street being asked to rip and read copy cold. These are professionals who presumably do listen to the news once in a while when they’re not on the air reading it. Even if these names, foreign and domestic, don’t come trippingly off the tongues of most Americans, they should be almost as familiar as their own to the people who are paid to say them.

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