CRITIC’S CORNER

Jane Pauley has handed her alarm clock over to Deborah Norville, but it’s NBC News that needs to wake up.

The truth is that the very public problems of “Today” are just the tip of the iceberg that threatens titanic damage to NBC News. It began earlier this year with the Bryant Gumbel-Willard Scott family feud and has culminated in the Pauley-Norville switch--which many in the media have delighted in portraying as some sort of cheap soap opera with an “other woman” story line.

In effect, the problems of “Today” are merely a foreshadowing of NBC News’ shaky tomorrows.

To put it even more bluntly, NBC News is perilously close to becoming a minor-player in the majors of TV news. And what it comes down to is a fundamental communications breakdown at NBC News--with the public, the press, its affiliates and, as the much publicized Pauley-Norville affair proves, even with its employees.

It began a year ago when newspaper veteran Michael Gartner took over as president of the news division. With no real television experience, Gartner almost immediately adopted a circle-the-wagons philosophy, installing a press representative whose main function, it seems, was to short-circuit rather than enhance relations with the nation’s TV critics (CBS News, under President David Burke, has taken a similar tack with TV critics, with far less adversarial posturing).

All would be fine if NBC News were delivering quality news. And quality has nothing to do with ratings (“NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw” has been third in a field of three in the network ratings race this season).

The Oct. 17 California earthquake proved more than any other recent event how far NBC News has fallen.

How is it, one wonders, that on the night of a horrific, even historic disaster, NBC was running prime-time fare for more than one hour after ABC, CBS and CNN were delivering video--some of which was from NBC San Francisco affiliate KRON-TV?

By NBC’s own admission, another communication breakdown.

“I don’t think we have a workable procedure for dealing with crises like this,” Gartner wrote in a widely circulated memo to his staff. “We had problems and confusion that were not related to . . . technical problems. . . .”

No “workable procedure” for dealing with a major breaking news story?

What procedures are in place, then, and what the heck are they for?

NBC News, like CBS and ABC, often depends on its affiliates for video and reportage for its broadcasts, which makes the news that KRON video showed up on CNN first even more embarrassing.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that Jane Pauley, a classy 13-year veteran of the top-rated “Today,” came to believe, as she told USA Today recently: “I thought NBC wanted me out, but they said no, and I didn’t believe them.”

Another communication breakdown.

Also unclear was the motivation behind the appointment this summer of “Saturday Night Live” co-creator and NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol to be senior vice president in charge of the “Today” show. The result of that move, namely the bungled, even insensitive Pauley-Norville matter, is far too evident.

NBC is hardly the first network to have its internal problems broadcast nationally. CBS, the subject of countless books, articles and bizarre episodes involving anchor Dan Rather, still may hold the edge in that category.

The difference is in the way NBC News has responded when things got messy--with silence, confusion and or denial, inevitably followed by excuses, finger-pointing or on-air band-aids such as Pauley and Norville’s kissy-poo exchange on “Today” (the show’s wacky weatherman Scott and gruff co-anchor Gumbel went through a similar on-air dance).

Ironically but perhaps not coincidentally, the decay of NBC News has come at a time when NBC Entertainment has been dominant. Even more frightening--as personified by the latest in network television’s longest line of news magazine disasters, the re-creation-laden “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow”--is its influence on news territory.

So don’t cry for Jane, America. She’s getting out of “Today” just in time.

The only regret she may have in the months to come, now that she’s agreed to extend her contract with the network and front another prime-time news series in 1990, is that she still has a lot of tomorrows with NBC.