I can't say for sure what might have happened here, but as someone who once did graphics for TV news, I can make a guess.

We used to have generic reporter name templates for every on air person, represented in the system by a number. So "Ron Burgundy" might be #503 in the queue, and you could all it up whenever you needed it. After all, there was no point in typing in the same name day after day after day. 

Is it possible this was an old version of that and they slipped in the wrong number, leading to what showed up on the screen? Again, can't say because I was doing it in the 80s and 90s and technology has changed a lot. But that could be one explanation - although why they would not have taken his name out of the system when he's been gone so long is beyond me. 

OK that's very different. I've known many people who call the graphics "subtitles" and I just assumed you were one of them. Appreciate the update. A lot of the CC is done automatically. Did someone say something that a machine might have confused with that old name? I've seen that kind of thing happen before and it's both embarrassing and hilarious. 

I used to watch the closed captioning on our station, which they hired a firm called "Waite & Associates" to do for them. Sometimes, it was so out of whack with reality that it became insane. I sometimes used to say "I wonder what the deaf people reading this think of us," when something completely the opposite of what was on the screen came up.

One or two misplaced words can change the meaning of everything - for instance, having the captioning saying someone was found not guilty of murder, despite the fact they were.