Brad Messer Commentary
8:15 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2002
Veteran KENS-TV weatherman Albert Flores has been fired. I don't know why. Well, maybe I do.
The party line at KENS is that Albert plagiarized from the internet to write his newspaper weather feature. Plagiarism is a form of stealing. One KENS spokesman said, "Our core values at KENS-TV news are honesty and integrity."
Of course, in business, another core value is increasing revenue and cutting expenses.
Could the new owners of KENS have looked at the payroll and decided to replace a few big-salary stars with some little-teeny salary starlets?
One television insider emailed me a reminder that some old-favorite faces have been disappearing. Salter and Benson came up. Local San Antonio people going, out-of-towners coming in from Chicago, Canada, New England.
My TV guy wrote,
quote "Albert was one of the highest-paid local news personalities,
second at KENS probably only to Chris Marrou himself. You don't spend
20+ years on the air in one market without building up quite a salary
package. Fact is, you can pay some up-and-coming out-of-towner considerably
less to do the same job (forget about local appeal or loyal following
-- faceless corporate entities care not about such things). We all know
it's been a rough couple of years for the media business, and every penny
counts.
I believe Chris Marrou is next in line. They could afford a dozen low-wage
news droids on what they're paying him." end of quote.
Firing Albert Flores was a hard-to-understand over-reaction, if he was canned for the reason KENS is giving.
Until more evidence is available, for now, the "corporate salary-cutting" theory is in first place.
Brad Messer— commentary, KTSA.
 Lifted from KENS-TV website before they removed it |