Channel 9’s News Slab Isn’t Spectacular Yet

The Walt Disney Co. reportedly spent a whopping $30 million in launching the three-hour slab of prime-time technonews that premiered Monday on KCAL Channel 9.

That’s inflation for you.

Consider this a Monday-through-Wednesday preliminary report on a newborn news operation that presumably will grow stronger and wiser with experience. To put this in further perspective, just remember the jokes and general ridicule that accompanied the birth of CNN in 1980.

However, KCAL is advertising its new 8-11 p.m. news block as something truly spectacular. If only because of that boasting, it’s immediately put-up-or-shut-up time.

The Coverage: Highlights so far are series from anchors Pat Harvey and David Jackson, the first profiling super-achieving “diamonds in the rough” who have risen above their confining environments, the second updating conditions in Vietnam in an insightful way that has relevance to Southern California.

Vastly superior to routine mini-docs, Jackson’s and Harvey’s reports have been of a quality and length (up to 10 minutes for Jackson, who reported from Vietnam) rarely found in local news.

This admirable commitment to longer, deeper stories (one newscast opened with a 10-minute package on AIDS) also has a down side, unfortunately. On Wednesday night, for example, Channel 9 allowed a light feature on senior-citizen surfers and skiers to drag on for nearly six minutes. And the station’s Monday-night coverage of the Hank Gathers story--opening with 14 minutes and building throughout the evening--was so pretentious, repetitive and generally obese that it cried out for liposuction.

KCAL has yet to discover, apparently, that flab is not synonymous with depth.

The perspective that super-anchor Jerry Dunphy has been promising viewers in infinite promos and ads has been largely absent, and the promised live coverage has been a gimmick, mostly consisting of reporters in the field from locales where nothing is happening or giving live intros (for no valid reason) to tape packages.

In a news operation that has been a technological fiasco to date, there were the inevitable “live” comedies, such as Wednesday’s 9 p.m. segment cutting from Harvey in the studio to Marc Watts somewhere in the field.

Watts (whispering, to the control room, apparently): “I’m in difficulty. Pat’s talking to me and and I can’t hear.”

But viewers could hear, as Harvey continued talking to Watts and he went on about his “difficulty.” Then . . . zap, he was gone, never to be heard from the rest of the evening.

Stranger yet is that with all its high-powered technology--including 19 mobile units, 10 with microwave capacity--KCAL has sometimes been asleep at the controls. The inevitable conclusion is that a single Stan Chambers (the KTLA Channel 5 veteran who every evening seems to be everywhere simultaneously) is worth 10 high-tech news trucks.

During KCAL’s 8 p.m. segment Monday, there was a terrible, traffic-jamming accident on the Hollywood Freeway that killed one person and injured five others. KCAL missed it. Earlier that day, a man was trapped in a hole at a Malibu construction site for more than an hour. KCAL missed it.

The Reporting: With a few exceptions, the level of journalism on KCAL so far has been uneven at best, mundane at worst.

Too many stories are poorly written (“The limits on the penalties he can impose are limited by law”) or poorly articulated (“Universal opinion of Gathers is the same”). Wholesale firings almost entirely wiped out the former news staff (some of whom were very competent), and many of the on-air replacements have a small-market sound and look that gives KCAL an amateurish taint.

KCAL hasn’t publicly broken down its news costs, but you have the impression that a lot of it went to purchase Thomas Guides, for its staff consists largely of newcomers, some of whom have been unable even to correctly pronounce the names of the areas and institutions on which they’re reporting. Southlands ?

And these people are telling Angelenos about their city.

Some of the Other People: If any one person is the gleaming symbol of this news venture, it’s the old Dumphkins, who co-anchors the 8 p.m. segment with Jane Velez-Mitchell and the 10 p.m. segment with Harvey, who is filling in for another just-hired but yet-to-arrive anchor.

Jerry Dunphy has not become the most durable and best-paid anchor in Los Angeles for nothing. He is a gifted news reader and communicator, and perhaps some of these performance skills will rub off on Velez-Mitchell, who arrived here from New York.

Harvey and Jackson co-anchor at 9 p.m. Jackson, whose pedigree includes stops at Miami and San Francisco, seems a bit uncomfortable sitting and facing a camera. It’s Harvey who’s the KCAL rocket when it comes to anchoring, a veteran of CNN and Chicago’s WGN who projects poise and competence.

Meanwhile, KCAL entertainment reporter John Corcoran (who once worked for KABC Channel 7) has arrived from Boston and is a real bean. The other night he reviewed “The Hunt for Red October,” giving it three stars on his “cork board”--based on his reviews of other reviews.

Weathercaster Wayne Shattuck has to be liked if only because he does not view himself as a comedian, although it is rather amusing hearing him refer to “our weather,” in that only a few months ago he was living in Oklahoma.

Joe Fowler is the Sportscaster From Hell, so overbearing (“Did you see the Lakers tonight? Huh? Huh?”) that you’d love to see him nailed to John Corcoran’s “cork board.” Fowler’s cohort Gary Cruz (known on the set as “the Cruzer”) seems good only by comparison.

Fowler is one of those sportscasters who starts many of his sentences with “Hey.” He and Cruz talk a lot, but it’s worth noting that with all that sports gab, this was the only station in town Wednesday to omit coverage of that day’s bubbling controversy over Gathers’ medical treatment. (While Fowler was reading sports headlines on the 10 p.m. segment, Channel 5’s Stu Nahan was in the studio interviewing Gathers’ close friend and teammate, Bo Kimble, about the controversy.)

The Tricks: Apparently to create a sense of movement and excitement, Channel 9 clutters its newscasts with infinite teases and updates of its own stories, and it injects a false immediacy in some stories by playing the “just in” game. And there’s more mislabeling when KCAL labels a rather routine story an “investigation.”

The Commitment: If Disney were truly committed to excellent news coverage, it would establish a bureau in Sacramento (where no other local station has a permanent presence) and cover this vitally important beat as it should be covered.

Bottom Line: Give these people at KCAL a break. Hey, they’re just starting.