Newscaster says BTS Oreos spell “death to America,” enrages K-pop fans
A Good Day Lubbock anchor is being hounded by the boy band’s supporters after making a weird joke on a recent TV broadcast.
Image courtesy of OREO
On the air this week, Good Day Lubbock anchor James Eppler joked that a limited-edition collaboration between Oreo and BTS features a hidden message: “Death to America.” Eppler, an adjunct instructor at Texas Tech University, used his FOX 34 KJTV segment to reveal the brand collab’s “secret code” as the same anti-nationalist slogan popularized during the 979 Islamic Revolution (which, notably, had little to do with Korea or its populace. Eppler is, apparently, not a history instructor at TTU.) Why anyone would willingly sic the militant devotion of the BTS Army on themselves is beyond me. When Eppler’s co-anchors reacted with appropriate levels of being weirded-out, he clarified that he was just joshing.
But BTS fans—a famously dedicated group of devotees to the band—were unwilling to brush off Eppler’s comment as merely a joke. A video of the broadcast quickly went viral on X, with members of the BTS army accusing Eppler of racism against Koreans and calling for his removal from FOX 34 KJTV. Perhaps he was just trying to make a multilayered statement about the marriage of consumerism and art under late-stage capitalism? It could also be as simple as he has a weird thing against Korean boy bands/minorities, as some online users have alleged. Regardless, he’ll probably want to lay low until the Army finds another battle to ride into.
The Oreos themselves, which will be available for presale on June 1 and available in stores while supplies last starting on June 8, are inspired by a Korean treat called hotteok, which has a brown sugar pancake flavor. From the looks of the packaging, the cookies will be purple with 13 different embossments to celebrate the group’s 13th anniversary. “We ate them as kids, we eat them in the studio, and now OREO is helping us share a taste of home with the world,” BTS shared in a statement. “We’re just so proud to add our own chapter to OREO’s amazing story.” The band joins Post Malone, Selena Gomez, BLACKPINK, and Lady Gaga as musicians to have collaborated with the cookie colossus.
Read Kayti Burt’s recent article, “BTS in a time of American imperialism,” here.
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