As many of your know who were watching both FOX6 and UPN13 today, we had several interruptions today in our programming in order to give updates on the results of the Mexican elections. Unfortunately, a couple of these announcements came at inopportune times for our viewers, the worst of which was at approximately 9:02pm, at a climatic moment in the FOX movie Men of Honor, and just as we were starting Stargate Atlantis on XUPN.
I thought the best way to explain this would be to re-print one of our angry e-mails from a viewer with the name removed to protect them. This is one of those e-mails and my response:
-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2006 9:29 PM
To: Richard Doutre Jones
Subject: Blog Feedback: Appalled
name: XXXXXXX
email: XXXXXXX
subject: Appalled
message: Dear sir, I am truly stunned and appalled at the fact that your station interupted an American war movie, "Men of Honor" (on the brink of "our" country's birthday), or any other program, to convert my television to "Mexican" television for about 10 minutes. If you wanted to get out the election results, you could have just waited a few minutes to give a "newsbreak" at the top of the hour. I am a multi-lingual American that understands and speaks Spanish, but if I wanted to hear Spanish and the election results in Spanish, I would change the channel. How does this result affect most of your viewers? The results in Mexico do not affect most of your viewers. Your station just "alienated" the majority of your viewers to try to pander to the few. I used to watch your station frequently, but now I will not. Concerned about our future. XXXXXXX
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Dear XXXXX, first I want to thank you for taking the time to e-mail us. I apologize for this five minute loss of programming...in addition to Men of Honor on XETV/FOX6, we also lost this same amount of time on Stargate Atlantis on XUPN/UPN13.
I agree with you, we would have preferred not to preempt our programming at this time (especially at the climatic moment on FOX6 when Cuba Gooding Jr's character "Cookie" had been brought up from the bottom of the river after accomplishing his "pass off" to be a navy deep water diver. Even though this was a difficult interruption, Men of Honor actually had almost an hour left after we came back from our announcement and we aired 100% of that last hour. At least on UPN13's Stargate Atlantis, it happened close to the start of the program.
To be honest, if we had the choice on what we would have preferred to do, we would have much rather aired this update later as part of a pre-produced news piece at 10pm. However, we were required to carry this message live, and we had no control over this message or the time it was to run. Making matter worse on FOX6, this normally would have been a re-run sitcom, not a World Broadcast Premiere movie.
As I said, we actually were required to take this message live on both XETV/FOX6 and XUPN/UPN13 from the Mexican Government voting office. Interestingly, while Mexican presidential elections take place only once every six years, this is the first time in many Presidential elections we have been required to air these type of announcements.
The reason for this has been delineated on our 10pm news for the last few days, and if you had watched you would see that we have been reporting on the Mexican elections and the fact we would be airing live announcements today. In the last couple of nights, this story was also on the ABC, CBS and NBC national news services, since these elections (to replace the current President, Vicente Fox) are the most important in over 50 years in Mexico.
People are very concerned about the disposition of the elections since it will not just have a huge effect on Mexico, but will also have a direct effect on the U.S., depending on who is elected as the Mexican President. The election is being portrayed as a fight between left and right; a choice between more state interventions or a continuation of free market policies.
As you might have seen tonight, the intention of the government at 11pm Mexico City time (9pm San Diego time) the intention was to announce the winner, but this is too close to call...they won't be able to announce the winner until Wednesday, and this is of great interest, not just to Mexicans, but also to Americans.
To give you just a little more information on the two main candidates (there are three primary candidates) who were in a “dead-heat” going into today’s elections:
The leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is a former mayor of Mexico City, and he has been linked to the anti-American dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. Mr. Obrador has promised major public building programs, but he has also committed to a break with cross-border cooperation with the United States. The conservative candidate is Felipe Calderon of the current ruling Pan party. Mr. Calderon is a former government minister who wants more foreign investment and greater links to the global economy and greater cooperation with the U.S. In other words, it is likely that the results of this election will be a partial referendum of how the U.S. and Mexico will exist over the next six years.
I would like to give you some additional information that should help you further in regards to our two stations (XETV/XUPN) and TV broadcasters in San Diego:
What makes our San Diego market unique is the fact we live, quite literally, just across the border between the U.S. and Mexico, which means many of the allocations for San Diego TV and Radio stations are carried by Mexican licensed signals. When TV and Radio channel allocations are given out, there are a restricted amount of signals that can be assigned in order to alleviate interference to radio and television signals and these were split between the FCC and SCT (this is the Mexican Government's Communication Regulating Commission that is equivalent to the FCC)
The FCC has established the rules which determine the distance necessary to prevent signal interference to protect any TV or radio station in the U.S., including those stations which are located along the border. The FCC and the SCT use this rule to protect border stations from interference both in Mexico and the U.S. (in addition, Channel 6 has another code of regulations, Title 47: 73.525 to protect us from radio station interference).
In San Diego we have 3 TV stations and 14(+) radio stations, including our local San Diego Padre station, Mighty 1090, all of whom have their transmitting facilities in Mexico.
The majority of these stations broadcast English speaking/U.S. programming, but they all have X in their call letters since their transmitters are in Mexico. This is why you hear the same type of PSA's on so many of our San Diego radio stations...and also on many radio stations in Los Angeles. This is true in many of the other cities who are within proximity of the U.S./Mexican border because the FCC and SCT had to agree on signal allocations to protect each signal.
XXXXXX, I can assure you that our interruptions today are very unique because of the historic implications of this election, as well as the concerns of the Mexican government.
At this point, it does not seem likely that we will have any more interruptions, but it is possible that we will have one more requirement on Wednesday when the final election results are announced.
This will complete our legal obligations but it is also the end of these types of interruptions for many years, at least until we are required to carry announcement from our own President of the United States, which seems to occur every few months. We will have more information tonight in our 10pm newscast and this will include some inside stories on what is happening in the Mexican political process and I would encourage you to watch.
One more important bit of information, we are very excited to tell you that in September on our sister station, XUPN13, on September 5th we are switching to XDTV13, and we will become an affiliate of MYNETWORKTV.
We will be changing all our promotion to www.mytv13.com and this will only give us some stronger programming to offer to our viewers in San Diego. What this means is our 8-10pm Prime Programming will be fresh and original programming, 5 out of 7 nights per week. Monday through Friday we will air on going dramas which will have 13 week story arcs. The first two are: Desire-Table of Five (8-9pm), and Secret Obsessions (9-10pm). On Saturday 8-10pm we will be recapping the stories that aired each week and we will be cross promoting this programming each day in our FOX6 in the Morning 5-9AM news cast. I have also included a link to give you more information on this programming: http://www.mynetworktv.com
I hope this answers your questions and restores your confidence in us. I hope you can see that since I respect you as a viewer, I have tried to give you as much information as possible on this matter so you can have a better understanding on what happened today. Finally, I want to wish you all the best for the remainder of your Sunday and hope you have a wonderful 4th of July with your family.
Warmest regards,
Richard Doutre Jones
VP/GM Bay City Television, Inc.
FOX6 & MYTV13