KHOU-TV anchor rips Entergy media rep for Houston power outage

Based on something I observed myself on the tube this morning, I sent this head's-up email earlier this afternoon to longtime South Beach Hoosier favorite Aaron Barnhart, TV critic of the Kansas City Star and the genius creator of the TV Barn website, http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/index.html one of the top TV sites in the country for the thoughtful and discerning TV viewer.
It doesn't really require much explanation to see where I'm coming from here.
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September 15th, 2008

Dear Aaron:

Just a head's-up for something you'll likely be hearing about and maybe even seeing video of in the next few days.

Last night, thanks to DirecTV airing KHOU-TV 11 telecasts of Hurricane Ike coverage on Channel 361, discontinued as of today, I was able to watch something you rarely see any more on live TV: angry personal invective by a reporter/anchor who felt unencumbered by either common sense or ethics.

Naturally, this blow-up was completely misplaced and a real classic example of 'shooting the messenger,' something that you'd think someone in the TV news business would appreciate better than most folks.

Last night/early this morning, one of KHOU-TV's male anchors hosting their Hurricane Ike coverage from the studio really lit into the media rep for Entergy for the Houston area still largely being in the dark, his seeming to think it was a matter of simple incompetency, not pure logistics and manpower.

The rep said the company had aid agreements with other power companies and that people were coming in from 19 other states to help Texans get their power restored, had planes flying people around the state to get them in a position to do their job first thing Monday morning, were doing aerial surveys and had everyone in the company out in the field.

But he also admitted that it would likely be Monday or even Tuesday morning before they could add up all the disparate info and get a realistic idea of when power would be restored.

Obviously, here in South Florida, it's drilled into people that you have to be responsible for yourself and your own family for at least the first 72-96 hours after a disaster.
(Not that people are!)

There's no cavalry coming into town to knock on your door after a day or so to ask you if you want some grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup with your drums of drinking water, like a waiter. (After Hurricane Wilma in 2005, I was out of power for over 11 days.)

So, less than 48 hours after Ike hits, this anchor at Channel 11 is giving the Entergy guy enormous grief for everything not moving fast enough to suit him.

Finally after a few minutes of this, the Entergy media rep said that he'd had enough, that he wasn't going to put up with any more negative media reporting not based on the facts on the ground, when everybody in the company was doing their best under trying circumstances to get power restored. (Their homes are out, too!)

And the anchor just kept going on and on about what a poor job Entergy was doing...

It was pretty wild drama to stumble upon by accident, but made worse by my not being able to tape it right away, and the station not showing the name graphic of the anchor while he was on his tangent, which is why I can't tell you his name or the name of the female anchor at the studio desk with him. (Ed. Note: Or if they did, I was too stunned to notice it.)
Sorry about that!

The power rep explained that his company's customers were not all clustered in just a few easy-to-resolve urban areas like CenterPoint Energy Inc., but were instead spread out over a much larger geographical area, including most of the rural communities affected by Ike.

The anchor couldn't care less.

He repeated his claim that Centerpoint was clearly doing a much better job, and then it got even more heated.

Despite the fact that from the very beginning, and to their great credit, KHOU was posting nearly everything they broadcast onto videos you could see on their website, not surprisingly, this particular encounter is not yet on the station's website.
At least not yet, as of 12:30 p.m. Eastern

http://www.khou.com/blcS.sc?search=Entergy&sorder=S&rep=&act=&cat=multi
Your search - Entergy - did not match any documents. No pages were found containing "Entergy".

Best video I've seen thus far is this one, which has a lot more than what is officially described here, including the dozens of oil barges in the Gulf waiting to get into port, who had to stay away from the area while the hurricane was on the way.
It starts repeating after about 18 minutes into the video, with VO descriptions of Blackhawk helicopters landing and President Bush coming Houston on Tuesday:

http://www.khou.com/video/topstories-index.html?nvid=282706&shu=1
Raw video: Bolivar Peninsula devastated
September 14th, 2008, The communities of Crystal Beach, Bolivar and High Island suffered the worst damage we have seen from Hurricane Ike.

Below is a perfect example of what has everyone down there upset, with most of the coverage being too urban/Houston-based, even while there are towns and completely underwater or destroyed. Just like Katrina and media fascination with New Orleans!http://www.khou.com/news/local/stories/khou080915_tnt_guardsmen_food.7a5e7c1f.html

See bayousinker's comments! I concur 100%.

Meanwhile, the best spot-on column of the weekend is this one in yesterday's Houston Chronicle by Lisa Falkenberg Maybe some live and never learn, along with the reader comments.

That could just as well describe people in South Florida and the Keys in particular, where alcoholics at Key West bars uttering their philosophical banalities during hurricane evacuations draw Miami TV cameras like flies -over and over and over!
It never ends!
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/falkenberg/6000302.html

By the way, my interest in this hurricane hitting Galveston and Houston is more than passing, since just before Christmas in 1855, my maternal ancestors arrived in America via Galveston by ship from Prussian-controlled Poland.
They put all their belongings in an ox-driven wagon and walked for days to get to the Texas Hill Country they'd heard about in Poland, becoming Texas Hill Country pioneers in the process.
My family has lived in the Cowboy Capital of Bandera ever since then.

Aaron, I hope that you can use your great industry connections to get and post the video of that KHOU reporter losing his cool to your great TV Barn site sometime soon.
As always, your website continues to rock!

Adios!
Dave
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If I get any info on that TV encounter from this morning, I'll post it here so you can see it for yourself.

By the way, two of my favorite financial reporters will be on Charlie Rose tonight talking about all the ramifications of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch stories, Charles Gasparino of Newsweek and Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times., who edits their great daily financial e-mail newsletter DealBook. His column archives are at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/andrew_ross_sorkin/index.html

Watch it on Channel 17 at midnight, since you never really know when WPBT-2 is going to air it, despite their schedule, just one of the reason's it's the country's worst PBS station.