Did They Dub Him Worst Person in the World, Too?

“NBC Ruins The Fun, Fires Employee Over ‘What Is Internet’ Video,” according to Matt Burns of the CrunchGear tech blog:

By now you’ve probably seen the Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pondering the wonders of the Internet. It’s a bit hokey and of course shows the NBC hosts talking nonsense about something outside of their expertise. Well, NBC clearly didn’t find it as cute as everyone else and reportedly fired the employee that uploaded it. Best Buy almost did that once. Remember how that turned out?NBC went and pulled most of the videos from the Internet. The video we embedded is dead. But of course they couldn’t get them all. Simply searching Google for Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pulls dozens of copies. Nothing ever goes away online. NBC should know this by now. It’s called the Internet.Seriously, NBC. No one was laughing at your then-star hosts. We were all laughing with them. It’s not like they were asking questions about the Internet now. This was 1994. No one outside of universities and X-Files watchers had any clue about the Internet. The video simply served as a nice reminder that the Internet grew in importance so rapidly that even some of the world’s most versed newscasters were simply clueless in the early days.

Talk about backfiring — instead of allowing viewers a minor laugh at two employees who aren’t even with NBC anymore (though there were rumors this past summer that Katie could return), NBC beclowns itself via its heavy-handed tactics. Though as CrunchGear reminds us, plenty of copies remain online, such as this one. At least for the moment:

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