I'm guessing Pat has never been a TV news assignment editor.
I have been there, and while I (thankfully) never had to deal with a story of the magnitude of the Giffords shooting, I lived through enough tense days to know that the absolute last thing going through the minds of the people covering the story is "which mic flag is on the stand?"
When the big story hits, it's all hands on deck. Every crew, every piece of gear, every vehicle. And if you're lucky enough to have extra resources in town from a sister station, as Belo apparently did with the KGW crew from Portland, you use the hell out of them.
What were they doing at that news conference? They might have been there getting cutaways and b-roll so the other KTVK crew could focus on getting bites from the news conference. They might have been providing the uplink feed of the unedited newser back to KTVK so the local crew could work on reporting the story for later shows. They might have been there on the network's behalf, supplying video to NBC so that New York had some resources of its own and didn't have to depend on overwhelmed KVOA and KPNX crews while it got its own people in place. They might have been there covering it for Portland, because it was a huge national story and KGW simply wanted to take advantage of having a crew in town for something else.
Whatever they were doing, their presence there wasn't a "mistake" on the part of KTVK or Belo or KVOA or KPNX or NBC or the ghost of David Sarnoff. They were there doing their jobs, because if you're a TV crew and you're on the job in a city where the biggest story of the year is breaking out, you get to the scene and you get your mike on the table and you get the uplink going and you don't really care what the number on your mike flag or the paint job on your news truck says. Within a few hours of a big story like this one breaking, you're going to end up with all sorts of mike flags from all over the country there anyway. That's the nature of the beast.
