The line between sounding dumb and sounding dangerously dumb is a fine one. Anyone who has been put in front of a television camera knows how self-conscious it can make you, how it can reduce you to a mumbling idiot in a few self-conscious seconds, how it can produce sentences out of your mouth that, if you typed them into your computer, you would almost immediately erase. Not necessarily because they were hurtful to anyone, but because of how stupid they made you seem.

When such statements are uttered on live television, there is no delete, only regret. And if that stupidity is based on insensitivity, and if that insensitivity creates pain for a whole class of others, you wear that ugly scar for the rest of your life. Maybe that’s not fair. But that’s life on the big screen.

By all accounts, Golf Channel announcer Kelly Tilghman is a bright woman and a good friend to Tiger Woods. But she is also someone who joked that his competitors’ only chance to defeat him was to lynch him. She has since apologized, and in the coming months, years and decades, she can prove the sincerity of that apology, prove that she gets it and understands the hurt her word choice caused to the African-American community.

But there’s no delete button when it comes to TV.

That separates what she said from what Golfweek magazine then did. Tilghman’s bad joke – an attempt to help Nick Faldo’s bad joke about rivals only beating up on Woods – led to a clumsy attempt by the magazine to sum up the stir it caused . . . by featuring a large noose on its cover.

Tilghman received a two-week suspension for her comments. Golfweek editor Dave Seanor defended the cover until Friday, when he was told he was no longer the Golfweek editor. His assistant, Jeff Babineau, replaced him, and has spent most of his time since explaining how a boardroom of editors – albeit all white editors – could possibly have come to the conclusion that the cover was a fine idea.

“We had a dialogue about it,” Babineau, who has served as an editor and writer at Golfweek, told The New York Times. “And we knew that if people saw the word lynch as offensive, they could also view the noose as offensive. We were trying to illustrate a story. It was Dave’s call, but he did it with the dialogue with the staff. In the end, we went with the cover we regret.”

Read those words carefully and try not to be depressed. “If” “people” saw “lynch” as an offensive word? They “could” find the noose as offensive? What people might those be? Those who remember an era in which African-Americans – emphasis on Americans – lived in constant fear of the word and that noose? African-Americans, Caucasian-Americans, Scottish descendants of William Wallace – exactly who shouldn’t see “lynch” as offensive?

In the meantime, Tilghman will serve the last few days of her suspension, even as Woods forgave her publicly Monday, calling her use of the word “unfortunate” and saying, “We all say things we do regret, and that’s certainly a moment she does regret.”

It was dumb, what she said, but there was no ill or uncaring intent. Uncaring and dangerous is what Golfweek, after much deliberation and easy access to that delete button, decided to put on its cover. Maybe Babineau is telling the truth when he said that diversity is a conversation in golf these days.

But that cover was more than a bad moment, and it suggests the tone of that conversation does not differ much from the time when that noose was more than just a painful reminder.