Arthur Rascon
Arthur “Art” Rascon is an Emmy Award–winning reporter and news anchor at ABC13 in Houston, Texas. “He has covered such major events as wars and conflicts in Iraq, the Balkans, throughout the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Central America, traveling with scores of juvenile immigrants on their deadly trek to the U.S. border. He has reported widely on U.S. Presidential elections, terrorist attacks both at home and abroad, the Virginia Tech campus shooting, and a host of hurricanes that have hit the Eastern seaboard and the Gulf coast, including Katrina and Ike. Rascon has covered other natural disasters throughout the world including the tsunami in Indonesia, and was one of the first journalists to report out of Haiti after the earthquake.”[1]
He has covered a variety of other international stories and has been a producer, reporter, and anchor in other Texas cities including San Antonio, El Paso, and Abilene, as well as Los Angeles, California, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
He told BYU Magazine, “I remember watching the close of the Vietnam War on television. We only had three channels and we had the rabbit ears on the television. I had to sit there and hold them for my dad so he could watch the television [and] it didn’t break up. I remember telling myself, ‘I think I want to be one of these guys.’ I had such a curiosity of the world—I wanted to report on it and see the faces and recognize more fully these stories.”
- “I practically flunked out of English. I was not a good reader. I was not a good speaker. I certainly couldn’t carry a story. I was not a good writer at all. My English instructor in high school said, ‘You need to find something you can actually do. You can’t do this.’ Everything that you think a reporter should be, I was the opposite. But now I’ve won Emmys in writing. I attribute my success to understanding that God is going to make much more out of my life than I could ever possibly make of myself.”
- “The Spirit has influenced my work in every degree imaginable, from saving my life to pointing me in directions that would provide safety and reassurance. I was driving down the highway at 2 or 3 in the morning after Hurricane Katrina with my producer and photographer. We needed to get to Gulfport, Miss., and as we were driving at 75 mph or so, I suddenly felt the impression to slow down. I came to a complete stop in the middle of the deserted highway. I said, ‘I can’t go any farther, and I don’t know why.’ I got out of the car, walked forward just beyond the reach of our headlights, and noticed that the entire roadway had been washed away. It was destroyed. It was a miracle that we survived, and it was only through the impressions of the Spirit.”[2]
Rascon earned his bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in 1985. He was sustained as an Area Authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 4, 2020. He had been serving as president of the Houston Texas Summerwood Stake.
