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Channel 11 Focus Shifts as Nightly Newscast Expands

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KTTV-TV Channel 11’s Fox News expands its nightly 10 p.m. newscast to one hour tonight with one major change: a heavy focus on entertainment news. Gone for now is the station’s dream of competing with network-owned stations at 11 p.m.

The Fox-owned station’s newscast will include an extended entertainment news segment featuring Mitchell Fink’s celebrity video gossip column.

Though co-anchor Kirstie Wilde says she is hopeful the hour broadcast will give the news department a chance to present more news, many KTTV staffers worry that the station is moving toward the lighter, tabloid philosophy that characterizes such Fox-created programs as “A Current Affair,” “America’s Most Wanted” and “The Reporters.”

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A year ago KTTV management said it would launch an additional half hour of news at 11 p.m., designed to compete directly with network-owned KCBS, KNBC and KABC. At the time, KTTV news director Steve Blue said that the station had finished with the willy-nilly anchor and news philosophy changes that had characterized the station for the past several years, and that he was prepared to leave his news team in place for the long haul. And in proclaiming his commitment to make KTTV the No. 1 station in town, Fox Chairman Barry Diller said, “Judge us by what we do.”

They have done a lot since. Some news department employees claim that Diller has been directly responsible for many changes, including the look of the set.

But more than sets have changed. First, the 11 p.m. newscast never materialized. Second, KTTV fired newly hired anchor Andrea Naversen six months into her two-year contract and hired Wilde away from NBC-owned Channel 4 to replace her. (Channel 11 subsequently won an Emmy for a broadcast that Naversen had co-anchored.)

Next, then general manager Bob Morse hired former NBC correspondent Eric Burns to offer commentaries on trends in the entertainment industry. But Morse was forced out last summer.

Robert Kreek, president of Fox Television stations, subsequently served as interim general manager at KTTV until last October when he hired Greg Nathanson, a former vice president of programming at ABC. Now the news goes back to one hour; only Nathanson, according to Burns, doesn’t like commentary, and Burns has been assigned as a reporter.

Recent changes seem tranquil compared to changes that swept through the station during the first year following Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of KTTV and six other stations from Metromedia in May, 1986. During that year, Channel 11 had two general managers and three news directors, got rid of longtime anchors and reporters Marcia Brandwynne, Tony Cox, Larry Attebery and Bill Smith and made wholesale changes in its news staff.

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Despite the turnover, the rather anemic ratings for KTTV’s newscast have remained virtually unchanged. In last November’s sweeps period, KTTV edged ahead of KCOP’s hour newscast at 10 p.m. but trailed longtime independent news champ KTLA by a wide margin.

“Nobody has a clue what they’re doing,” said one KTTV news employee. “We’re not going after news anymore. People with good news stories are laughed out of the room. Eric Burns was the smartest, most creative person on the staff, and he gave us something that no other station had. When that’s the first thing they ax, it’s a clear signal that we’re going in the wrong direction.”

Burns originally was to anchor the projected entertainment segment, but KTTV sources said he refused to introduce reports on such things as how Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard were getting along on the set of their new movie without making fun of them. KTTV management subsequently gave the entertainment anchor job to Janet Zappala and informed Burns only last week that his commentaries were now taboo.

Burns said that management perceives him as a “loose cannon” simply waiting for an opportunity to bad-mouth Fox. When he was hired, he said, Morse gave him a mandate to go after Fox programs once in awhile, just as KABC’s political commentator Bill Press occasionally criticizes some of his own station’s programming. But twice in the last few months, Burns said, commentaries critical of Fox shows were squashed by his superiors. Meanwhile, the premiere of “Working Girl,” 20th Century Fox’s latest smash film, was covered extensively by KTTV news.

News director Blue downplays Burns’ apparent demotion, saying that he simply decided that the viewers would be better served if KTTV eliminated commentary entirely. “I just think the time is better spent doing good storytelling. Burns is a tremendously talented reporter and I’m enthused about his doing some good, solid reporting on the entertainment business.”

The entertainment segment will occupy anywhere from 6 to 9 minutes nightly, according to various KTTV sources. Blue said it will contain the usual Hollywood material about premieres and celebrity parties, four nights a week of Fink’s gossip column.

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“Entertainment is news in this community,” Blue said. “It affects jobs and opinions. I think it’s news just like stories about the homeless and politics are news.”

Blue also plans to introduce a nightly 4-minute “fun, fascinating feature story on people or issues or politics similar to the stories one might find in the View section of The Times.”

Though Blue insists that the new program will be a “hard-edged newscast” and that his superiors at Fox support a serious approach to local news, plans to cover city, county, state and police issues in a regular and systematic way remain uncertain.

Many in the KTTV newsroom said that Fox Chairman Diller has been calling many of the shots at the station. Diller, Burns said, didn’t like the cityscape news set and he directed the anchors not to talk to each other or to the other reporters on the set as much as they were used to.

“Yeah, Diller changed the set,” one news employee confirmed. “That’s the first thing someone changes when they don’t know anything about news. For some reason, he’s extremely interested in news. He comes in, lurks around, and management is afraid of displeasing him. He’s like an unseen dragon breathing down their neck, and there’s nobody left here to fight the battles, to carry the vanguard for quality news.”

Diller confirmed that he did suggest that the station use a more natural newsroom set, and that he supports and encourages first-rate entertainment reporting. He said he has had conversations with KTTV’s news director in the past, but he said the rest of these charges are “untrue.”

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Management at all seven Fox-owned stations have been urged to create and produce programs that the company can sell to stations around the country. Such Fox successes as “A Current Affair” and “America’s Most Wanted” originated at Fox stations in New York and Washington. The entertainment segment of the KTTV newscast apparently has been designed as a prototype.

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