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LEAD-IN BY HOST ROBERT CARDENAS: Part of every KPFT News broadcast is devoted to examining what issues are presented in the local corporate mainstream media. This week, Brandon Moeller looks at how the Houston Chronicle praised the pants off of El Paso Electricity for being a good neighbor to Mexico. But were they? CRITICISM: The Houston Chronicle considers 17-day-old news to be front page material, or at least it did in yesterdays edition. The paper’s Environment Writer Dina Cappiello reported a story that other newspapers reported shortly after November 18, when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality granted El Paso Electric a sweet deal and an easy way out of reducing pollution emissions at one of its oldest plants. The story was about the energy company donating 60 kilns developed by Roberto Marquez, a former professor at New Mexico State University. Marquez’s design is able to reduce air pollutants coming out of outdoor ovens that some Mexican citizens use to bake clay bricks, which they can sell for about 10 cents apiece. The new kiln design has been tested and data shows it can reduce pollution from older kilns by 80 percent. One article available online by the El Paso Times states that an estimated 450 to 500 pollution-causing kilns are in existence in the area. The Houston Chronicle reported that the 60 kilns El Paso Electric is giving to some Mexican residents costs $510,000, but they didn’t emphasize that by doing so, they are skirting the high costs of fixing their old power plant so that it doesn’t pollute so much. But I guess those pollutants can’t cross the border. In 1999, the Texas legislature required grandfathered powerplants, like the one owned by El Paso Electric, to lower their emissions by 50 percent before May 1, 2003. However, back then in 1999, is when El Paso Electric began to start testing the kilns to try to prove to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that they can help reduce pollution in the El Paso, Texas and Juarez Mexico area. Simultaneoulsy, they were able to get their way in the legislature so that allowances from pollution reduction gained in Mexico can be applied to plants in the United States, even though pollution from clay kilns is not chemically similar to pollution from power plants. What this means is that El Paso Electric gets to scratch 60 Juarez brick bakers’ backs while it scratches its own and doesn’t have to fix its old plant thanks to cross-border emission allowances that it lobbied for. Of course, the Chronicle didn’t take this angle for the story and made the energy company look like a saint. Despite reporting the story more than half a month after it happened, the Houston Chronicle, or more precisely reporter Cappiello, didn’t do much research and certainly didn’t tell about El Paso Electric being investigated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for its alleged role in the California Energy Crisis. In fact, the same day this long-winded puff piece ran, El Paso Electric agreed to refund $14 million dollars it had robbed from consumers and stay out of the power trading business for two years. Fortunately for readers, this story was on the Houston Chronicle Web site today. I wonder if the Houston Chronicle or El Paso Electric paid the reporter for this story? Brandon Moeller, KPFT News, Houston. E-mail Brandon Moeller at brandonmoeller@hotmail.com . This criticism was broadcast on December 6, 2002.