A Howard Stern fan posing as an eyewitness to yesterday's Malaysia airlines crash managed to prank MSNBC during an on-air segment with a surprising off-color joke.
Presenting himself as "Staff Sgt. Michael Boyd" from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, the prankster convinced producers at MSNBC's "The Cycle" to put him on live television with host Krystal Ball. She asked him what he saw, and he replied, "Well, I was looking out a window and I saw a projectile flying through the sky and it would appear the plane was shot down by a blast of wind from Howard Stern’s a**."
The New York Daily News reported that the caller was billed as an "eyewitness exclusive," but clearly his credentials were never confirmed.
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Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was carrying 295 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was downed near the Russian border of eastern Ukraine. The White House condemned the shoot-down almost immediately, saying the "incident occurred in the context of a crisis in Ukraine that is fueled by Russian support for the separatists,"
according to The Wall Street Journal.
Ball was unfazed by the crude comment, either refusing to acknowledge it or preparing her next question so carefully that she wasn't paying attention in the first place.
The latter is more likely, considering she asked a follow up question: "So it would appear that the plane was shot down, can you tell us anything more from your military training of what sort of missile system that may have been coming from?"
Clearly surprised she didn't catch the joke, the caller responded, "Oh you’re a dumbass, aren’t ya?" before the call was cut off.
Some suspected the prankster could be a frequent caller of the Stern show who goes by the name of Captain Janks. In the past, fans of the show have also called into Peter Jennings’s broadcast of the O.J. Simpson chase and interrupted Anthony Weiner’s resignation from Congress,
according to Salon.com.
Erik Wemple of
The Washington Post chastised MSNBC for the segment, saying the show's failure to properly vet its callers betrayed its "towering incompetence." He showed that a simple search on Google Maps reveals that the U.S. Embassy in Kiev is roughly a 10-hour drive from the site of the crash, making it unlikely an embassy staffer would be anywhere even remotely nearby to witness the tragic event.
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