KNBC Sweeps Slate Clean for Quake Story

The quake shook the Bay Area some 400 miles to the north, but Los Angeles television station KNBC saw it as the ultimate local story. From shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday, when the station’s news department first learned of the disaster, until 7 p.m. Wednesday, Channel 4 scrapped all of its regular programming to provide continuous coverage of the disaster.

The NBC-owned station had never done that before--not after the Whittier quake two years ago and not after the Sylmar quake in 1971.

While rival station KCBS Channel 2 switched over to “The Pat Sajak Show” late Tuesday, KNBC kept its anchors up through the wee hours of the night to talk about the quake. While KABC Channel 7 broadcast its daytime soaps as scheduled Wednesday afternoon, Channel 4 carried San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos’ press conference from the streets of that city’s devastated Marina District.

“It’s the E-word,” Tom Capra, KNBC’s news director, said Thursday. “Earthquakes, especially one in San Francisco on the San Andreas fault, scares everyone down here. They want to know how bad it is. Many people here have relatives or friends in the Bay Area, and we want to know how they are. My daughter was evacuated from her dorm at San Jose State and is staying with her grandparents in Santa Cruz. I think people want to know as much as we can tell them.”

In the first hour after the quake rumbled through the Bay Area, Channel 4 couldn’t tell them much at all. Its San Francisco sister station, KRON, was knocked off air by the temblor.

But from about 6 p.m. Tuesday onward, when the station was finally able to get pictures out of San Francisco, it was all earthquake, all the time. Like other local stations, Channel 4 sent several of its own reporters to the Bay Area, and also drove Phil Shuman to Santa Cruz in a rented satellite truck.

Capra said that his station certainly did want to catch up with its competitors, who all had pictures of the area more than an hour earlier than Channel 4. But once the station was able to obtain KRON’s coverage, which KNBC used liberally throughout the day, Capra said he figured: “Why stop? The satellites were working, we had our people there, we had their coverage and it was a story that changed and changed.”

John Beard, who anchored many hours of Channel 4’s coverage, said that the extensive reporting was justified because Southern Californians can learn from any large earthquake.

“Even though we’re told it’s going to happen here again, there’s a part of your mind that refuses to believe it until you see it. We saw it for 24 hours--how people dealt with it, how preparedness paid off and what kind of questions were raised about our readiness for the quake and about the infrastructure, the freeways and bridges down here. There are so many parallels that it becomes a Southern California story.”

KNBC’s continuous coverage also proved a boon in the ratings. Between 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. Wednesday, Channel 4 averaged a 9.9 rating and 32% of the audience--about twice the number of viewers it gets on a normal day. KABC Channel 7, which aired live earthquake coverage for part of that time period, registered a 6.4, while KCBS Channel 2, which broadcast the majority of its regular schedule, received a 3.6 rating. KNBC’s newscast from 4 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday also easily outdistanced its two competitors.

A KNBC spokeswoman said that a few viewers called to complain because they couldn’t see their favorite soap opera, but calls to the station, she said, were running about 6-to-1 in favor of the extended quake reports. Capra said it was the first time that preempting regular programs didn’t produce outrage from at least some viewers.

“When Richard Ramirez was captured, we preempted the NBC baseball game of the week to go live with that,” he said, “and this guy called up the newsroom and said he was going to come down here and rip my heart out. Here they captured the Night Stalker, who had been terrorizing the entire area, and this guy wanted to kill me over missing the second inning of the Cubs and Cardinals. We didn’t have anything like that this time.”

Capra added that sending reporters up to the Bay Area and procuring satellite time to beam their reports back to Los Angeles did cost the station “something,” but he added that the extensive coverage was not “overly expensive.” He said he could not be more specific. No extra personnel were hired and the station was able to air all of its regular local advertising spots.

Some of KNBC’s competitors, who chose not to devote so many hours to the San Francisco quake, complained that KNBC’s coverage in the middle of the day Wednesday became “repetitive and boring.” But Channel 4 personnel dismissed that criticism as sour grapes.

“This is such an important story for us in Los Angeles. It deserves this kind of attention,” said KNBC anchor Linda Alvarez. “It’s going to happen here and we can all get prepared with radios and flashlights and water. But we have to keep mentally prepared too, and this really helps us to see what can happen. I think showing as much as we can of what happened up there really makes it hit home. I don’t think we can over-report this story.”

And when the big one finally does hit at home? “We wouldn’t be off the air yet,” Capra said Thursday. “You’ll see us here for for days on end.”