Staying on Top of the Shake-Up : Nielsens Jump as Viewers Tune In for Quake News

Southern Californians scurried to their television sets almost before the earth stopped shaking Wednesday night.

Ratings data available Thursday from the A.C. Nielsen Co. showed that more than twice as many people were tuned to local 11 p.m. newscasts Wednesday as on Tuesday.

Though in the first 20 minutes after the 10:53 p.m. quake, local TV anchors Hal Fishman, Kelly Lange, Tritia Toyota and Tawny Little had little to say other than that the floodlights in their respective studios shook “pretty good,” nearly 9 out of every 10 television sets in use between 11 and 11:15 p.m. were watching either KTLA Channel 5, KNBC Channel 4, KCBS-TV Channel 2 or KABC-TV Channel 7.

The combined audience for the four newscasts was more than 1.9 million households.

KTLA and Fishman, benefiting from the advantage of being on the air with a 10 p.m. newscast when the quake hit while the three networks were wrapping up their prime-time entertainment shows, won the most viewers at 11 p.m. Its extended 15-minute report scored a 10.9 rating. The night before, KTLA’s rerun of “Cheers” had registered only a 4.4 rating for that same time period. (Each ratings point represents 48,002 households.)

KCBS-TV benefited from the quake as well, virtually doubling its 11 p.m. news audience from the night before. KNBC and KABC also attracted significantly inflated audiences over the previous night.

“I myself as a citizen want to know what’s going whenever there’s an earthquake,” said Jeff Wald, news director at KTLA, explaining why people flocked to their television sets for information about the quake. “I want to know how big it was and where the epicenter was. And people are conditioned to turn immediately to TV for that kind of information.”

“Two things go through your mind when the earthquake hits,” said Fishman in a phone interview on Thursday. “Our duty is to impart information about earthquakes, but also to constantly stress that our initial information is unconfirmed. Most of our information comes from callers. If something appears to be logical, then you’ll broadcast it.”

Fishman pointed out that a crucial decision of anchors on the air is to “dissect the foolishness and not make statements that will alarm people or start rumors.” The viewers who disdained sleep, “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “A Current Affair” and everything else on cable to learn about Wednesday’s temblor initially heard anchors assure them that they too had felt the earth shake.

Most of the coverage consisted of the anchors fumbling through reports that people from Oxnard to Oceanside to Ontario were lighting up the station’s switchboards with news that the quake had rattled windows or sent dishes crashing to the floor. (One-upping the TV stations, news radio stations KFWB and KNX put their callers on the air to offer personalized descriptions.)

Lacking any hard data on the size or epicenter of the quake, KNBC’s Lange repeatedly told her audience that the high rises in downtown L.A. shook for a good 15 seconds. The folks at Channel 5 dusted off the schoolroom map of the California fault lines that Fishman keeps in his office and speculated about which fault might have triggered the tremor.

Channel 2 rushed reporter Hosea Sanders out to Cal Tech’s seismographic center, only to have him report that experts there had yet to release any information about the quake. And reading from a “bulletin just in,” KABC’s Little ultimately remarked that she had no new information to report and apologized for “wasting” her viewers’ time.

It wasn’t until about half an hour after the quake that Channel 7’s Paul Dandridge first reported that the temblor measured about a 5 on the Richter scale and was centered on the ocean floor just off the coast. Those who stayed up late enough eventually heard the same news on all the other stations.