New KABC News Director Stays With Familiar Faces

It’s inevitable: Once you reach the top, the only place to go is down. Just ask the Dallas Cowboys, Dick Van Dyke or CBS. And while it would be foolhardy to write off the folks at KABC-TV Channel 7 just yet, this city’s dominant television station for the past decade has recently been showing a few chinks in its armor.

Most obviously, the news dynasty that KABC built following the arrival of anchorman Jerry Dunphy from Channel 2 in 1975 is teetering under the challenge of rival station KNBC-TV Channel 4. In the last two major ratings periods, KABC’s news programming has been No. 1 as measured by Arbitron, but KNBC’s has won the battle in Nielsen.

If that isn’t crisis enough, Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News,” which features the most enduring and recognizable on-air team in Los Angeles, is currently in the throes of a complete management overhaul. The station has a new general manager in former news boss Terry Crofoot; a new news director, Roger Bell, just in from Denver; and a soon-to-be new assistant news director, Jim Hattendorf, formerly a KABC producer and until recently the news director at the ABC-owned station in Chicago.

The current No. 2 man in the newsroom, Vic Heman, has been asked to move to the programming department to produce the station’s magazine show, “Eye on L.A,” and Mark Mohr, formerly the producer of the 11 p.m. newscast, is being pulled from news to work on the entertainment show as well.

(In addition to the management changes in news, KABC’s programming director, sales manager and director of engineering have all defected from Channel 7 to join former station chief John Severino, who left KABC last summer to head up the Prime Ticket cable network.)

Bell, 37, who assumed command of the Channel 7 newsroom earlier this month, dismisses any tremors at the station as the inevitable growing pains that accompany a change in leadership. No station can install new management, he said, without going through “a period of adjustment.”

Nonetheless, Bell, who worked at KABC for 10 years before spending 1988 as news director at the CBS affiliate in Denver, said the strength of “Eyewitness News”--the one factor that has made it such a formidable ratings force for so many years--remains: its very stable team of anchors. And despite any behind-the-scenes changes, Bell insisted, his on-air mainstays will remain in place.

“This station became No. 1 when Jerry Dunphy and Paul Moyer and Dr. George (Fishbeck) came to the station,” Bell said. “Those are the folks that put us on the map. Viewers trust them and believe in them. They are as dependable as the newspaper that shows up at your door every day. Regardless of what else goes on or what our competition does, I’d change anchors over my dead body. That dependability is worth its weight in gold.”

But while Dunphy, 66, Moyer, 47, and their “thirtysomething” colleagues Ann Martin and Tawny Little will continue to spearhead KABC’s news effort, Bell suggested that everything else is fair game for review. He declined to offer any specific changes he has planned for “Eyewitness News,” except to say that he intends to make sure the “presentation of the news is up to date and contemporary.”

Whether that means a new set, new graphics, new peripheral on-air talent or something entirely different, Bell refused to specify. Both Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2, which recently revamped the look of its news team to give it a hipper, more yuppie appeal, sport a slicker, younger news look and style.

“We’ll make adjustments based on our gut feeling,” Bell said. “But there’s nothing to get real excited about. The competition has gotten tougher, but we’re still strong in key demographic groups. There is no big reason for us to change anything.”

Bell attributes the increasing competition to the success of “Geraldo” at 4 p.m. on Channel 2 and the continuing dominance of NBC’s prime-time schedule on Channel 4. Both stations, he said, have been stealing viewers away from KABC’s early and late newscasts.

“But how long will that popularity last?” Bell asked. “I can guarantee you that somewhere down the line, ‘Geraldo’ will not be on the air and our newscast will still be important to a large audience.”

He also pointed out that ratings for ABC’s prime-time lineup are steadily ascending, although KABC had been able to maintain its lead in news even when the network was floundering in last place.

Like every other news director in town, Bell insists that his station’s first commitment is to hard news. He concedes that television news is a slave to immediacy--that live pictures reporting what happened in the last 15 minutes from a recent crime scene or chemical explosion generally take precedence over less fresh, perhaps more serious or complex news and issues. He also concedes that in order to compete, local TV news will always be compelled to present its share of “feature material.”

Bell notes, however, that KABC continues to employ a fistful of some of the city’s most reliable and time-tested street reporters, including Mark Coogan, John North, Gene Gleasen and Joe McMahan.

But KABC’s detractors contend that the station has never been known to rest on the journalistic skills of its top news reporters. This is the station renowned for its ratings shenanigans--such as sweeps series on lesbian nuns, Vanna White’s lingerie and on the Nielsen families themselves.

This is the station that made gabby, happy, even pouty on-set crosstalk between anchors and reporters a local institution. And this is the station that wrote the book on using its newscasts to help promote entertainment programs on its parent network.

It has been ripped by television critics and its competitors alike--”sometimes deservedly, more often unfairly,” Bell said--for many of these innovations. On the other hand, that has not prevented its cross-town rivals from emulating some of the very same audience-grabbing tactics.

“My goal is to beef up our news reporting,” Bell said. “Sure, we have to pay attention to sweeps. Our sales department needs (ratings) numbers to sell to advertisers. We always need to look at who our audience during a particular newscast is and try to find feature material that appeals to them. People are complicated individuals. They want to know what’s going on in the news and then they want to know about fashion in Moscow or the horoscope as well.

“We just have to be careful that nothing we do for the short-term ratings gain hurts us in the long run. I hope we never do anything to lose the sense in the viewer’s mind that we’re about news.”