NBC dropped “under God” and “indivisible” from the Pledge of Allegiance on Sunday.
After immediate backlash, on air later, announcer Don Hicks said:
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.
Rather than the assurance “It was not done to upset anyone,” I’d love to hear the reasoning behind editing the three words out. And did they think no one would notice?