14 DAY TRIAL // KTVU has already apologized profusely for the major hoax it fell victim to when reporting on the crew of the Asiana Airlines plane that crashed in San Francisco a short while back, but the National Transportation Safety Board is still adamant it did nothing wrong.
After blaming the blunder (shown in the video above) on an intern, the NTSB has now released a statement to say that the unnamed guy has been fired for acting “outside the scope of his authority.”
“He should not have even been addressing the [station’s] question in the first place, but he did. He made a very bad mistake and a bad judgment call, but it wasn’t a malicious thing. The news station read off a list of names to him [that] they said sounded right,” a spokesperson says.
“And they shouldn’t have done that. And he shouldn’t have done that, but he did, and we’ve taken responsibility for it, and we’ve taken action to keep it from happening again. He did not know they were fake names,” adds the rep.
In other words, TV station KTVU was pranked by getting a list of fake (and offensive) names for the Asiana crew and, when they called the NTSB for confirmation, this guy who just happened to pick up the phone confirmed that the list was accurate.
At no point did any of the names sound wrong to all these participants. After all, how could they? See the video above if you don’t see the irony here – and listen to the names.