Respect’s Rare When You’re No. 1 at KABC

Paul Moyer and Ann Martin are tired of being seen as L.A. TV’s Ken and Barbie.

For the last seven years, the wide-eyed ex-baseball player from Torrance High School and the former TV weather girl from Seattle have been the most popular news anchor team on Los Angeles TV. Month after month, their 5 p.m. newscast on KABC Channel 7 trounces the competition.

“But we don’t get credit for it,” muttered Moyer, the first $1-million anchor in town.

Martin is more philosophical: “The nature of the beast is money . . . advertising money,” she said. “The critics look at you and say, ‘Oh, Ken and Barbie!’ But the real question is, ‘Does the audience still tune in and does the guy who hired you still give you a paycheck?’ If they do, who cares? If you know you’re doing a good job, who cares?”

Then, after a thoughtful pause: “You have to have a thick skin in this business.”

The perks tend to toughen the skin. Big salaries, nice homes, sensational wardrobes, neat cars. If he’s not in his Mercedes, Moyer makes the commute from his Santa Monica home to KABC’s Hollywood studios each afternoon in his 1985 Ferarri. Martin and her husband Roger, a motion picture cinematographer, recently bought beach property on Puget Sound as a weekend getaway.

Still, the respect they get is, well . . . limited.

Martin and Moyer have taken their lumps from critics and competitors for being attractive and imitative. Martin, a cool and introspective blonde, is sometimes described by peers as a young Christine Lund--though, in her mid-30s, Martin is not that much younger than the original Eyewitness News Blonde.

Moyer, 46, has been chided for copying the style of fellow KABC anchor Jerry Dunphy, 65. When he was a reporter for four years on CBS affiliate KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh in the late ‘60s, Moyer reminded viewers of Dan Rather. And 10 years ago, Moyer was accused of actually being fellow KNBC anchor Tom Snyder.

“When Tom left and went back to New York, a significant number of viewers thought he had never left KNBC because Moyer looked like him, had his voice, his mannerisms. . . . He was a Tom Snyder clone,” recalled a longtime L. A. news man.

Snyder, who says he has had his fill of TV, returned to radio last fall and now hosts a nightly coast-to-coast talk show for ABC. He wouldn’t comment on Moyer or television.

“I suffered under that comparison, but that was in another life,” said an obviously irritated Moyer. “I mean, that was a long, long, long, long time ago. That’s history.”

Martin’s trials have revolved more around the cute factor.

Shortly after she graduated from the University of Washington, Martin answered a newspaper ad seeking young, attractive women to audition for the position of weather girl at KIRO-TV in Seattle. For the next decade, she fought against cute assignments.

“My first real story after I did the weather for a year or so, was covering a hula hoop tournament,” she recalled. “I really didn’t like that. I didn’t want to always get the panda bears at the zoo. I didn’t want to be a total fluffhead.

“I used to go home and just cry and cry. There were people there who wanted to put me through speech therapy!”

If she was mousy and drab then, by the time she landed in L. A. 12 years ago, she was ready for the Big Time. She did overnight stints at hostage scenes, standups in pouring rain and interviews with both celebrities and scum. Once, during a labor strike in Long Beach, she did a “Live-at-5” report while dodging raw eggs that strikers tossed her way.

By 1980, she was ready to anchor.

“Before she became an anchor, she had darker hair and no distinguishing features. She wasn’t plain exactly. She just didn’t stand out,” said one of her former producers.

But then-KABC news director (now head of ABC Sports) Dennis Swanson began her metamorphosis, according to the producer. Using makeup and critiques, he finished her transformation from weather girl to anchor star. Though she acknowledges Swanson’s role as something of a Pygmalion, Martin denies that he “made me over.”

“In fact, in the beginning, he told me, ‘I don’t think it’s gonna work. You’re too low-key,’ ” she said. “I don’t know whether he said that to just make me more determined or what. But it worked.”

The lack of recognition for their efforts becomes particularly hard for Paul and Ann to take during sweeps ratings periods.

Sweeps--the months of February, May and November when every TV station in the country is rated by A.C. Nielsen Co.--are virtually the only time of year that anchors leave the studio.

It is then that KABC management calls upon both Moyer and Martin to hit the pavement and come back with four- and five-part news series, or “mini-docs,” on topics that are pre-arranged, packaged and promoted, often before the final interviews are on tape.

“The classic was ‘Lesbian Nuns,’ ” said Martin. “(KABC reporter) Lonnie Lardner still hasn’t lived that one down.”

The sweeps topics are only occasionally subjects the anchors get to choose. When Dunphy is ordered to stand next to a freeway and talk about gridlock or Tawny Little interviews celebrity moms, they rarely have the option to say “no.”

In the past, the pair have been consigned to reports on such subjects as “Sex Education in Our Schools” (Moyer) and “What’s New in Beef Today?” (Martin).

“I certainly have a great deal of input as to what mini-docs I do,” Moyer said. “I don’t want to do ‘976-Phone Sex.’ I don’t want to do ‘What’s in a Hamburger.’ And I don’t do them. I think I’ve put in enough years in this town and this business to be able to say that.”

But, when push comes to shove, Moyer and Martin do report on the sweeps subjects they are assigned. They just happen to have been luckier than, say, reporter Harold Greene, who has been assigned to eat garbage with the homeless, interview porn star Marilyn Chambers and, just the other day, get to the bottom of dial-a-porn.

“You’re asking me to defend that series? I can’t,” Moyer said. “It’s on the air because, A), there is some news value in it in terms of what’s going on with the Public Utilities Commission and the telephone company and all that crap, and, B), let’s face it: It’s a sexy topic. They hope it draws viewers. It’s sexy.”

But sweeps are not all bad, according to Martin and Moyer: More people tune in for the sensational material and it gives the Eyewitness News team an opportunity to showcase their best aspects as well.

“If you get more people in the theater, but you show ‘em a good movie, what’s wrong with that?” Moyer asked.

“We run a lot of series at the same time (as the more lurid series) that are useful information,” Martin said. “I think they do a mix here and the heavier end of the mix doesn’t get enough credit. It’s too easy to concentrate on the other stuff. People who watch us here week in and week out know we do a good job.”

Beginning this week, for example, Martin’s sweeps series on child care will air. With two children of her own at home, it’s a subject near and dear to her heart. Though the Martins can afford a full-time baby-sitter, many working couples cannot and she tries to empathize with them. Her series moves from corporations that provide child care for their employees to a group care home in South-Central Los Angeles.

It’s a sweeps series that was done before by Christine Lund--as well as others on other channels--but it’s one that always works.

“At KABC it’s a science,” said a former staff member. “They get local two-minute breakouts on the ratings that pinpoint exactly what works and what doesn’t and they know, they know. And they’ll milk it till it’s dead. A few years ago, chocolate was one of their big sweeps topics and they did chocolate over and over again until the numbers dropped off.”

Martin recalls an audience survey in the early ‘80s that showed that viewers were at least as interested in health, quality of life issues and restaurant reviews as they were news.

“It’s real hard to attack what works without attacking the audience,” she said. “I don’t want to do that. I like my audience. If it didn’t work, people wouldn’t watch and we wouldn’t do it.”

Moyer’s series this sweeps, beginning Feb. 22, is on abortion.

“So far,” Moyer said recently over dinner at his favorite eatery, Musso and Frank’s, “the part of the abortion series that’s intrigued me most is sitting down and talking with these girls that have just been through it or have decided not to do it and have gone ahead and had their kids.

“I like to get five or six of them in a group and sit down and let the camera roll and it’s amazing: First they’re all nervous and then they get relaxed and forget about the camera. True feelings and emotions come out. I like that. I hope that we’re going to have a lot of that on the series.”

He paused over his broiled halibut as a woman with a screaming baby on her hip passed by the table.

He deadpanned, “A Channel 7 viewer just went by, talking about tonight’s show.”

“He has a real black sense of humor,” said producer Richard Draper. “A lot of people in the business have an on- and off-button, but Paul’s always pretty much the same. What you see on TV is what you get in person.”

Draper first got to know Moyer during his KNBC days in the early ‘70s when Moyer and Kelly Lange co-hosted “Sunday,” a defunct newsmagazine that Draper helped produce. He has stayed in touch with Moyer through Moyer’s two marriages and a traumatic station change in 1979, when Moyer left KNBC for KABC.

“He’s not Ted Koppel, but a lot of people say he’s just a nice guy, likable, friendly and just a personality,” Draper said. “I don’t think so. As he has grown older, he has increasingly tried to grow up with the business. KABC is famous for their T&A;, but as Paul has matured as a reporter, I think he has found sweeps to be a little offensive. He has opted out. He has said ‘no’ to things that offended him.”

As he has moved to the top of the anchor heap, Moyer has become more pensive about the things he hasn’t done in his career and the challenges that remain. He went to the University of Arizona at Tucson on a baseball scholarship, but never tried out for the majors.

“I didn’t have that fire in the belly you have to have for the majors,” he said.

Instead, he became a business economics major and started moonlighting as a radio deejay to pay his tuition. From there, his climb was steady: news director at a Sacramento radio station; TV reporter in Sioux City, Iowa; six months in Peoria; six months in St. Louis; four years in Pittsburgh and a year at WCBS-TV in New York. By 1972, he was ready to return to Southern California where he did a six-year stint at KNBC before moving over to his current home at KABC.

“I think he sort of fell into the business,” said Irwin Safchick, news director at KNBC at the time Moyer was fired and who has since been fired himself. “He’s had a lot of lucky breaks. I feel the same way with my own late lamented career: Things just happen. Some people have their eye on the target all the time, but I always believed that no matter how hard you might try, things just happen.”

Martin too has been lucky. At one point, when she and her husband first moved here so he could attend USC film school, she was so burned out on the business that she hid out at home and read murder mysteries. It took some time for her to work up the nerve to apply for a job.

“I always thought I wanted to be a doctor,” she said. If she ever leaves anchoring, she may opt for more health-oriented reporting. Her younger sister became a cardiologist and, when she does get a chance to pick her own assignments, Martin opts for medical stories. Last year she did a sweeps series on allergies in part because she has been plagued by allergies most of her adult life.

“I like what I do,” Martin said. “I do my own writing and I like the extemporaneous challenge and I like the people I work with. When I talk to groups about (television), I tell people to trust in serendipity a bit when preparing their futures.”

“Ann’s much more sincere than either Christine (Lund) or Tawny (Little),” said a former colleague. “They play the game of being a star, like Moyer. Ann’s really unique. She’s a good reporter and she cares and she’s real. She used to sit at her desk and sing Christmas carols a capella . She has a beautiful voice. She’s kind of a Miss St. Anchor.”

“Credibility or believability has nothing to do with whether somebody is attractive on the air,” said Moyer. “It’s whether you really believe what they’re saying.

“When I go out of town, I’ll switch around to see how they do the news in whatever town I’m in and, sooner or later, I find one station I like and stick with it. I think everybody does that. Why? I don’t know why. Why does one person pick Ann and me over somebody else? Because, in their judgment, we are more believable, more credible.”

Getting off the set and doing their sweeps stints can reinforce that credibility.

“If you don’t do it, you get stale,” Moyer said. “If you just walk in and read scripts and go home, then you fall into the stereotypical local anchor role: the bubbleheaded Harry Hairspray who wouldn’t know a news story if it bit him on the ass. We have a lot of those in the business, but I’m not one of them, and I don’t want to be one.”

Martin isn’t so quick to write off the cosmetic side of TV news either: “TV news is like choosing friends: You don’t just pick the ones who blend into the wall paper,” she said. “You pick the ones who stand out.”

She’s not so vain or naive as to believe that her fans watch her for her journalistic expertise.

She sighs wearily and laughs: “This is such a goofball business.”