Fans fighting for better TV

A cadre of weary and angry Mountain West Conference fans are on the warpath to get better TV coverage for the league, and they're deploying myriad creative methods to get the job done.

While other MWC fans have turned the issue off, petition and call-in campaigns to cable providers and satellite companies DishNetwork and DirectTV continue.

This small but vocal army has been hard at work since league officials and TV partners had no announcement of increased coverage at the MWC Football Media Blitz in Las Vegas last week.

The issue is lack of distribution of The mtn. network, a channel that exclusively carries league sports programming including most of the football and basketball games. To date, 17 cable providers, mostly located in the league's footprint, have offered the channel. Still, many parts of Utah including Weber County and St. George do not have MWC games on The mtn. available.

While DirectTV representatives have told some MWC fan callers they are close to a deal and will offer the network in late August, nothing is confirmed publicly.

Clayton Burke of Denver is calling for frustrated MWC fans to join in a phone assault to dish companies to get attention of upper management they cannot reach. Burke is planning to target the national call center for DirecTV en masse between 2 and 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, then assault DishNetwork's call center from 2:30 to 3 p.m. that same day.

Not to leave Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV provider, out of the loop, another call campaign to Comcast's call centers would kick off from 3 to 3:30 p.m.

Telephone numbers for those companies are available on the Internet at www.Themtn.tv — a Web site featuring the new channel — and were published in Saturday's Deseret Morning News.

An online petition, which has accumulated nearly 6,000 electronic signatures in the past seven days, calls for action from the dish companies.

"If we get thousands of people to call at just about the same time," said Burke, "targeting each company separately, that ought to make someone in upper management hear us."

Other fans have found direct links to specific names of people in cable and dish companies and have published their names on the Internet. In Arizona, fan Michael L. Capener has located Mike Parry, vice president of marketing for Cox Cable, and is pushing his phone number (623-328-3703).