The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Summer Intern who last weekend sabotaged an already-doomed news telecast by providing Oakland TV station KTVU Channel 2 with four fictitious names purportedly belonging to the pilots involved in the fatal Asiana Airlines Flight 214 tragedy has been fired, according to a report filed by CNN.
Both the NTSB and KTVU issued statements over the weekend apologising for the incident, the former stating that when Channel 2 representatives had called to confirm the names an intern provided them with four racially insensitive misnomers that nobody else at any point down the line bothered to read, sound out phonetically or pay any mind to at all; nothing so much as a cursory glance, just read anything that’s put on the teleprompter!
An NTSB government official in Washington confirmed overnight that Summer Intern is no longer doing egregious PR for the agency, regardless of the fact that they didn’t actually invent the names and only passed them down from someone who should’ve known better in an agency apparently bereft of a modicum of good sense.
While it remains unclear who produced the names, the NTSB has confirmed it was definitely not Summer Intern: “The names were presented, by the station, to the intern for confirmation,” NTSB spokeswoman Kelly Nantel told the cable network. “The intern did not make up the names and provide them to the station.”
In a statement released following the broadcast, the NTSB stated it would take “appropriate actions… to ensure that such a serious error is not repeated”; which means firing a lowly worker who, while evidently a dunce who should’ve known better, was apparently following the instructions of senior employers who perhaps should also come to know something of what constitutes ‘appropriate actions’.
There’s something wrong with this picture.
