This seems a bit dramatic.

In hilarious 1994 footage of NBC’s Today Show, the now-famous American television journalist Katie Couric asks her fellow co-hosts how the internet works.

But it seems NBC did not see the funny side, as the employee responsible for making it public has been fired from his job at the television station, according to a Washington Post reporter.

The YouTube video shows Katie Couric, along with fellow anchors Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas, talking about the ‘@’ sign and saying how ‘stupid’ it sounded to pronounce it as ‘at’.

[…]

But Washington Post journalist Rob Pegoraro revealed on Twitter that the employee has been fired.

He told followers: ‘The guy who posted the 1994 Today Show “What is internet?” clip on YouTube e-mailed to say he got canned for that. Ugh.’

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It wasn’t as if the employee posited that the on-camera exchange occurred recently. It was, if anything, self-mocking, a measure to see how far society has come in terms of technological use.

But of course, there’s this:

He said: ‘What this is really about is NBC realising it (is) employing somebody reckless enough to take its intellectual property without permission and exhibit it in any way, shape or form on the internet.

It appears as though it was a video recorded off of someone’s television. Unless it was a recording taken home … as much as I don’t want to agree with it because it seems thin-skinned, they have a point.

Previously:

Vintage Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel: “What Is Internet, Anyway?”