'Fire Katie': An idea whose time has dot-com

When severe storms drift within 100 miles of Kansas City, you can be sure of two things: Kansas City's TV weathercasters will bigfoot all over their stations' prime-time lineups, and some viewers are going to be hopping mad when they do.

  This year is shaping up to be the longest storm season ever, what with Mother Nature getting a head start last week, sending some February thunderclappers through the metro area and deadly tornadoes further south.

  As usual, KCTV-5 was the most aggressive and alarmist in its storm coverage last week, which started at 7:12 p.m. and didn't end until after midnight. That meant blowing out the entire night of CBS entertainment -- not only “Jericho,” “CSI:NY” and “Criminal Minds,” but John McCain's presidential announcement on “Late Show with David Letterman.”

  KCTV-5 incurred the usual wrath of angry callers and emailers. But one viewer came up with a more creative response. He launched FireKatie.com, an often hilariously savage hatesite that gives full vent to his and many other TV watchers' frustrations with local TV storm coverage.

  Talk station KMBZ-AM (980) yakked about FireKatie.com. Web sites across the country linked to it. And the site was slammed with hits, according to its creator, who identified himself as Derrick Smith, a 35-year-old web designer from the Northland. (After our interview, “Smith” said he didn't want to be photographed, and gave me an out-of-service phone number as his contact. He blamed the phone company, and late Monday — after my story went to press — the phone number was indeed restored.)

  “Katie Horner is once again making headlines with her cries of wolf during February 28th's thunder storms,” the site declares. Her coverage “has become nothing more than a joke, largely of her own making. Although we truly don't wish any ill will towards Katie, it's time we make our voices heard and let KCTV 5 and other local news stations know there are alternatives to this sensationalism and if these practices continue we will boycott their local programming and their advertisers.”

  In a phone interview on Friday, Smith said he doesn't really want to see Horner fired. He's just tired of having his network viewing interrupted by forecasters in what strikes him as a transparent ploy by each station in town to brand itself as the weather leader.

  “Since she was the one who brought this all on with the wall-to-wall weather coverage which everybody copied, she's the best one to make an example of,” says Smith.

  Ironically, what pushed him over the edge wasn't anything he missed on CBS but the fact he couldn't watch “Lost” on KMBC. (NBC affiliate KSHB-41 and ABC affiliate KMBC-9 also pre-empted at least an hour of prime time Wednesday.)

  “That upset me the most,” said Smith, who — in fact — seemed quite good-natured on the phone. “Especially when Larry Moore got on there and told everybody to watch it online. Like the whole world has high speed Internet.”

  But, he added, “KCTV is really the problem here. Their coverage generally, across the board, is sensationalistic. Doomsday. Their whole evening report is about scaring people.”

  Horner was on vacation when I called, so I spoke with Kirk Black, the general manager of KCTV and KSMO (“My 62”) and, one could argue, the real object of FireKatie.com's discontent.

  Black insists that KCTV and KSMO pre-empt programming on their airwaves to keep people safe, and nothing ticks him off faster than suggesting that it does so primarily to toot its own horn.

  “The number one reason we stay on is not to make people mad, not because we're full of ourselves, but because we are going to stay on until every viewer in our area is out of danger. A lot of older viewers are in outlying counties who, if we did not do what we did, would not get the information that we provide.”