Richard Nangle adds a new detail with his article in today’s paper:
“We didn’t just speak to the access people; we also spoke to the city regulators,†[WCCA’s] Mr. DePasquale said. For example, he said, The Research Bureau reported what Fort Worth received in a grant from its cable operator for capital and equipment and left out about $1 million in operating funding from the city.
[The Research Bureau’s] Ms. Schaefer responded, “We did not include capital grants in ours and he included capital grants in his chart.â€
I asked them this yesterday: did your report oversimplify the funding picture? Now Ms. Schaefer is admitting that yes, there are aspects of funding that they didn’t report on.
If WCCA’s numbers are right, in some cases the Research Bureau oversimplified to the tune of $1,000,000.
(Not just capital grants, but also operating funds.)
One more wrong thing to add to the story: As you know the Bureau compared WCCA TV against a number of public access centers. The more we looked into the report, the more errors we kept finding. We looked to find the public access center in Bay City and discovered that a public access station does not even exist there.
WRONG INFORMATION LEADS TO WRONG DECISIONS.
Mauro
To clarify: Bay City may have a publicly-funded station, but may not be public access, and not available for the use of the public at large. But I haven’t confirmed this, being too lazy to phone them myself.
I spoke too soon; here’s a T&G article about this:
http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061218/NEWS/612180615/