BOULDER, CO – An engineer has been terminated from his job at KMGH, the local NBC affiliate station, after it was discovered that he had been venting his personal frustrations through the network’s closed captioning feed.
The errant captioning affected mostly late night/early morning shows.
KMGH, like many local networks, only had one closed captioning engineer on duty at any given time, and there was no reason to suspect a problem. However, after numerous complaints from deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers began to pour into the station, the station manager decided to tune in from home, in order to verify the claims. What he found led him to take action.
The engineer responsible, who has asked to remain anonymous pending trial, did not appear to acknowledge that what he had been doing was wrong. “The [station] will let them garnish my [wages] to pay for her [...] lyposuction, but will they let me talk about it? Will they give me a forum to voice my opinions on this? No!”
Although is not known exactly how long the problem has persisted, KMGH has set up a special hotline for dealing with any additional viewer complaints. At the time of this writing, however, they are not accepting TDD calls.
Tags: Miscellaneous