Broadcasters Weather Barry

As of Sunday morning, July 14, only one TV station, Nexstar's Fox affiliate WNTZ-TV Alexandria, La., had reported being out of service in the wake of Tropical Storm Barry and no AM or FM stations were put out of commission. There were 44,249 cable subs out of service in the areas in Louisiana (43,717) and Mississippi (532) affected by Barry.

That is according to the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), which relies on self-reporting by communications providers.

That figure was combined TV, internet and/or phone provided by those cable operators.

It was a snapshot as of Sunday morning, the latest FCC report on storm-related outages, by which time the storm had weakened to a tropical depression.

The FCC activated DIRS July 12.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.