Sep
23
Covering Angel
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9
Angel Pilago came in second in the Big Island mayoral race and wins a run-off berth against the top vote getter Billy Kenoi, former aide to Harry Kim.
I got a nice email from a Hilo viewer wondering why Pilago didn’t get more coverage, and some nasty emails which, while not directed at me personally or even at the station, represented an assumption that Pilago was being deliberately ignored for one reason or another.
This warrants an explanation, if only to remind us all of Occam’s Razor, which cuts through conspiracy theories with the enjoinder, if you hear hoofbeats, don’t think “zebras.” Often there is a simpler and more benign explanation than always to assume something nefarious is going on.
KGMB9 was the only TV station to broadcast live from Hilo on primary night and we needed to bounce the signal up to a satellite and back down to Honolulu to manage it. It was expensive and tricky. A satellite truck had to be shipped to the Big Island by barge, which meant we couldn’t use it on the transport days no matter how big a story broke.
What happened on primary night was very simple. The top vote getter was in Hilo and the second-running finisher was in Kona. It wasn’t physically possible to be in two places at one time. We didn’t even have the option of cutting out early and racing across on the Saddle Road because in the first round of ballots Lorraine Inouye was in second place. We wound up having to cover Angel Pilago the following day.
(Kenoi was late to his own victory party because he campaigned in Kona all afternoon and was driving in the opposite direction.)
We had more than 50 people working election night including a crew on Kauai whose reports were transmitted by FTP over the Internet. For our station, staffing the primary meant 100% turnout. We did more broadcast and Web coverage than any other station. But as you might guess our resources are not infinite and our planners are not omniscient. In covering Angel, the devil was in the details. But nobody did it on purpose.
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Please don’t let it happen again. Go Angel!