Local Stations’ Latest Routine: Who’s on Top?

Everybody loves a winner, and winners love to brag when they’re on top. But with three local television stations all touting themselves as Southern California’s news “leader,” it’s hard for viewers to tell who really is No. 1.

Since the end of the May sweeps, KNBC-TV Channel 4 has been congratulating itself on the air for becoming “Southern California’s favorite.” Archrival KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News,” the perennial ratings champ, has countered with the slogan: “No. 1 in Southern California, 10 years in a row.” Meanwhile, KCBS-TV Channel 2, last of the three in last month’s ratings race, has launched a promotional campaign to brag that it is “Southern California’s real news leader.”

They can’t all be top dog. Or can they?

Technically, all three network owned and operated stations have what seem to be legitimate claims to the title “news leader.”

In four head-to-head local news time periods, Channel 4 beat Channel 7 in two, tied in a third and trailed in the fourth, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co.’s May survey. Though neither Channel 7 nor Channel 2 has an early morning news program, Channel 4’s “Today in L.A.” also handily beat network morning news programs on the other two stations.

Meanwhile, Channel 7 swept every local news time period as measured by Arbitron, a rival ratings service.

And while Channel 2’s promos ignore the ratings completely, the station justifies dubbing itself “Southern California’s real news leader” by pointing out that it has won more Emmys, more Golden Mikes and more Los Angeles Press Club awards for excellence in news coverage than any other local station.

“We would never say that we are the No. 1 station in terms of ratings because we are not No. 1,” said Andi Sporkin, spokeswoman for KCBS. “But in terms of what we define as real news, we are the real news leader.”

Explaining the discrepancy in the ratings numbers as measured by the two ratings services is the $64,000 question in trying to figure who is No. 1.

The explanations supplied by the ratings services and the local stations are complicated, technical and for the most part inconclusive. The simplest answer seems to be that although both services base their results on a random statistical sampling of approximately 500 local households, Nielsen’s group of families last month simply had different viewing habits than did Arbitron’s.

Currently all seven local VHF stations subscribe to both Arbitron and Nielsen, while the two Spanish-language stations subscribe only to Arbitron. However, Channel 4, the station seemingly most affected by the discrepancy between the two ratings services, plans to drop Arbitron when its contract expires this fall, a station spokeswoman said Thursday, “because we have encountered numerous problems with (Arbitron’s) methodology.”

Though over the years the press and advertisers have tended to favor the Nielsen numbers, the split results of last month’s survey leave KNBC and KABC with bragging rights. Those rights are important in that, just as the first-place Lakers have an easier time filling their arena with fans than the last-place Clippers, there are those in local television who theorize that some viewers favor one station over another simply because they want to be with the winner.

What counts for the stations is how the ratings translate into advertising dollars. Currently, advertisers use both sets of numbers to determine on which stations they’ll buy time and how much they are willing to pay for commercials. According to KCBS’ research department, 60% of the station’s advertisers rely on Nielsen, 40% on Arbitron.

Advertisers rarely concern themselves with the total number of households, Sporkin said. Their decisions are based on demographics--how many males age 18-34 are watching during a particular time period, for instance.

And even though KCBS trailed in both surveys, Sporkin said “some advertisers prefer to buy time (on our station) over Channel 7 because of the kind of people (in terms of age, education, income and the like) that watch us.”

In the end, then, this promotional battle of egos means little in determing who actually is the cocky front-runner and who is the scrappy underdog. With a split decision in the ratings and all three stations splitting hairs in terms of numbers and what constitutes “real” news content, local television stations will play it any way they want it.