NBC News Apologizes for Slow Quake Coverage

The chairman of the NBC affiliates board, James Sefert, has passed on to the network’s 208 affiliates copies of a six-page letter he received early last week from NBC News President Michael Gartner that explained, but did not excuse, the slow start in network coverage of the Northern California earthquake on Oct. 17.

NBC was almost two hours behind ABC and CBS in getting video reports out of the Bay Area that evening.

The beleaguered news division got a little lucky with the timing of the release of the correspondence--just as it was making points with still-muttering affiliates from its up-and-at-’em coverage of the whirlwind changes in East Germany last week.

” . . . the purpose of this letter . . . is not to point fingers,” Gartner wrote Sefert early last week. Sefert is president of Cosmos Broadcasting Co. in Greenville, S.C.

Gartner then went on to apologize to the stations for “our not having our top-of-the-line talent readily available and for not ensuring that the entire staff was up to the task of handling an emergency” that night.

He reported that he has made several changes in “these and other areas and I am dedicated to ensuring that nothing like this will ever happen again.”

Among the problems Gartner noted the night of the quake: San Francisco affiliate KRON, unlike competitors for ABC and CBS, had only inadequate emergency power available in the first couple of hours after the quake struck, preventing use of a portable satellite uplink.

Meanwhile, KCRA, the Sacramento affiliate that had footage available, had trouble getting access to a satellite because of administrative fumbling by the network. After weeks of in-house investigation, Gartner confessed to Sefert that why NBC News initially failed to link up with KCRA “remains the one mystery and the one fact that can’t be determined by records or interviews or tapes.”

Taking full blame for the foul-up on Oct. 17 and pledging to do better, Gartner told Sefert that “several practices and procedures already have been readdressed at NBC News. But even if the better procedures had existed Oct. 17, we would not have been able to bring you video from downtown San Francisco any quicker than we did.”