On the morning of Wednesday, May 14, Torrey Meeks, a 25-year-old freelance writer and producer in Las Cruces, N.M., rolled out of bed and checked his various Web pages. “Unbelievable,” he thought to himself. “This thing is blowing up.”

The previous afternoon, Mr. Meeks, along with thousands of others, had taken his first (and second, and third … ) look at the Internet’s viral video du jour—specifically, a decades-old clip, freshly unearthed on YouTube, featuring news anchor Bill O’Reilly (long before his current Fox News fame), unleashing a curse-filled tirade on the set of Inside Edition.

For the next several hours that afternoon, the young producer meticulously spliced together the video of the tirade with an audio mash-up, by an equally amused fellow Web user, that set the series of invective to a thumping dance anthem.

Just before going to bed, Mr. Meeks posted “Bill O’Reilly Flips Out—Dance Remix” on YouTube, along with a link to his MySpace page.

Mr. Meeks produces an Internet show called “Fail,” about the iffy professional ventures of two stoned slackers. A typical episode might get several hundred views.

By Friday afternoon, visitors had watched his O’Reilly Remix more than 600,000 times and traffic on his site spiked.

“It was a like a godsend,” Mr. Meeks told NYTV.

He was hardly alone in that sentiment. Last week, all across the media landscape, ravenous Web publishers everywhere were likewise marveling as the traffic piled up on their sites.

All thanks to the anchor freakout.

Sue Simmons, the longtime anchor of WNBC in New York, sparked the week of the Web’s viral re-creation of these Network moments (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”).

On the night of Monday, May 12, during a promo for the upcoming 11 o’clock news, Ms. Simmons suddenly snarled at her longtime co-anchor Chuck Scarborough, “What the fuck are you doing?”

The clip of the dependable, professional, very grown-up Ms. Simmons, who has smiled at New Yorkers from that anchor chair since 1980, swearing madly at her longtime television companion hit the Internet roughly 24 hours after that original O’Reilly-freakout video went viral, and pretty soon the nation’s first unofficial Anchor Meltdown Week was in full fucking swing.

Analysis of angry-anchor syndrome was everywhere you looked. It was like television was trying to reclaim its own discarded moments, made important only on the Web. It wasn’t very pretty.

There was Michael Musto on Showbiz Tonight arguing that Ms. Simmons was entitled to one “boo-boo after all these years.”

On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and a fake “body language expert” pored over Mr. O’Reilly’s behavior frame by frame.

CNBC’s Donny Deutsch speculated that screwing up on the air might be good for one’s ratings (as long as it goes viral on YouTube, right?).

On The View, Whoopi Goldberg said that people had lost their minds.

Kathie Lee Gifford declared the digital age a scary one for anchors.

Perhaps. But for those with a taste for the genre, it didn’t take long to realize that we are now living in a golden age of anchor meltdown.

Type “anchor” into YouTube and you can spend hours watching TV correspondents being heckled by drunken sports fans, walking into street signs, falling down snowy slopes, being bitten by animals, knocking laptops off desks, sputtering, cursing and falling off chairs.

Decades worth of material is free for the taking. Last week as the anchor-meltdown coverage had just started to gain steam, Richard Blakeley of Gawker composed a compilation video of them, which hit the Web on Tuesday, May 13, and with the help of links from Fark, Digg and the Drudge Report quickly stoked the interest in angry anchors into a full-blown frenzy.

The next day, page views on Gawker were the second-highest in the history of the site.

“Thank you, Sue Simmons and Bill O’Reilly,” wrote Nick Denton.

So where did all the archival anchor-meltdown material come from in the first place?

Producers who have spent time working at local TV newsrooms tell NYTV that historically at every station, there’s at least one guy—usually a camera man or producer with a wry sense of humor—who loves to capture and collect all the screw-ups of the on-air talent. In years past, before the dawn of the Internet, whenever a big mistake happened, word would spread around the station, and the guy with the gallows humor (or his buddy) would pull the air check, dub the incident onto VHS and add it to his collection.

Later, during festive moments at, say, the anchor’s going-away celebration or at the office holiday party, the in-house blooper man would pop the gag reel into the VCR and everyone at the station would laugh themselves silly.

Such moments were typically infused with a populist undercurrent—a friendly reminder to the well-paid on-air talent that just because you have your head plastered on a billboard over the highway doesn’t mean you can’t, say, get bit by a snake on the morning show.

And now that the populist undercurrent has taken over media completely—well, it’s not an undercurrent anymore, is it?

Chez Pazienza, the well-traveled former news producer, who has written about the foibles of the TV news business in his memoir, on his personal blog and for the Huffington Post, said that every TV station he’s worked at, from Florida to California, has a bunch of gag reels—all of which are saved for posterity.

“That stuff doesn’t vanish,” said Mr. Pazienza. “People hang onto to it. Nobody kept that O’Reilly tape because they said to themselves, oh, you know, some day this guy is going to be huge. They hung onto it because it’s funny.”

For the most part, before the advent of video-sharing sites, such compilations were kept in house, for station members only.

One of the first people to break into the pre-Internet, insular world of candid anchor videos was the comedian and anchor Harry Shearer (of The Simpsons and This Is Spinal Tap fame). During the early ’80s, Mr. Shearer was working at 30 Rockefeller Center as a writer for Saturday Night Live. There, his office was outfitted with a TV that picked up the raw feeds from news studios throughout the building. Mr. Shearer liked what he saw.

“I began thinking, gee, you shouldn’t have to work here to see this,” Mr. Shearer told NYTV recently.

And so Mr. Shearer went about setting free the raw anchor footage. Over the past two and a half decades, Mr. Shearer has become the Johnny Appleseed of unpolished anchor clips. How exactly he gets the material has always been something of a trade secret. But over the years, Mr. Shearer has incorporated unflattering footage of the likes of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw into his public radio show, his comedy routines, even into museum exhibits.

The mission continues to this day. Recently, Mr. Shearer created a couple of massive hits on his Web site, My Damn Channel, by posting extended clips of Katie Couric waiting to go on the air, endlessly obsessing over her wardrobe, poking fun at Dan Rather and famously pondering Cindy McCain’s “husky” eyes.

Mr. Shearer said that the appeal of such footage had changed over the years. “When I first started airing … such footage of Peter, Tom and Dan, we were still living in an era when those guys were authority figures, an image much buffed and burnished by their networks,” Mr. Shearer explained. “What this kind of footage did was chip away at the statuary a bit, and demonstrate their lack of omniscience—my Jennings clip had him getting coaching from the crew on how the Constitution is amended. These days I think it’s become part of the larger phenomenon of celebrity inflation and deflation.”

Back in New Mexico, Mr. Meeks was still celebrating his send-up of Mr. O’Reilly. He said that he thought the popularity of such footage reflected people’s frustration with large media companies—each screw-up serving as a physical revelation of the networks’ inherent fallibility.

“Making fun of talking heads is our equivalent of pointing a finger at the big conglomerate networks and laughing,” said Mr. Meeks.

“We’ve gone from a time when it was interesting and useful to skewer the pose of authority to a time when the whole concept of authority is suspect culturally,” Mr. Shearer said. “Nobody knows more than anybody else.”