A source and one of our commenters has told StoptheCap! that Time Warner’s news operation in Rochester was asked not to report on yesterday’s critical service outage pending the arrival of an official corporate statement on the matter.  R-News has traditionally operated with a firewall in place between the newsroom and Time Warner Cable’s executives.  R-News was not supposed to answer to Time Warner Cable in how they handle their coverage.  Now there are questions about whether that firewall remains in place.

As of this afternoon, there was no mention of yesterday’s service outage on the R-News website at all.

NorthEast Radio Watch, which in my opinion is an essential weekly read for any and all things broadcast related in the northeast, has heard the same information.  Scott Fybush, who writes the weekly online newsletter, reflected on this and his past employment there as a reporter:

TWC did a remarkably poor job of getting the word out about the extent of the outage and its attempts to rectify the problem. At least here in Rochester, TWC’s phone lines were, understandably, in a state of constant busy for several hours.

So what about the cable news channels the company operates, such as R News in Rochester? We’re hearing that the word came down from upstairs not to mention anything at all about the issue until an official statement was available, which turned out to be some time after the problems had been resolved.

Noting here that your editor is a former R News reporter – and that there was a little more editorial independence back in our days there – we’re wondering: if R News and its sister channels are no longer making any pretense of independent news coverage of their parent company, why not at least put those channels to use as a readily-available way to let customers know about big outages like this…and maybe even ease the pressure on overloaded call centers?