That doesn't absolve Scripps of their responsibility to make sure that the content going into their system isn't owned by someone else.
If one were the sort to blackball others, the fact that an algorithm did it for them, on the basis of data that they fed in is essentially no excuse for me.
“We apologize for the temporary inconvenience experienced when trying to upload and view a NASA clip early Monday morning," a Scripps spokesman told Motherboard. "We made a mistake. We reacted as quickly as possible to make the video viewable again, and we’ve adjusted our workflow processes to remedy the situation in future.”
I repeat myself: "Could be Scrips just says yes automatically to every hit generated by Content ID."
So they have some responsibility for saying yes (i.e. their workflow was select all, yes), but it was youtube that misidentified the video, not that Scrips uploaded a video from NASA into content ID as you wrote.