‘Today’ Takes a Plunge After Pauley Exit : Television: Dial-spinning sets in as the NBC program loses its lead in the usually stable morning news market.

In morning television, where viewing habits are as traditional as orange juice and coffee, the “Today” show lately has been waking up to a cold shower in the ratings.

Since Jane Pauley departed and was replaced by Deborah Norville as co-anchor on the 38-year-old NBC show, “Today” has been replaced by ABC’s “Good Morning America” as the top-rated network morning news show, with “Today” losing a surprising 10% of its rating in one three-week period.

Last week, “GMA” topped a nine-week winning streak in the Nielsen ratings, claiming its first victory over “Today” in a February sweeps period since November, 1985.

For the month of February, one of four times a year when the ratings of every station in the country are measured to determine advertising rates, “Good Morning America’s” average viewership was 4.1 million homes a day--representing 21% of the audience watching TV at that time. “Today” had 3.3 million homes and 17% of the audience. And “CBS This Morning” had 2.5 million homes and 12% of the audience.

Compared to February of last year, “Today’s” ratings were down 22% while “GMA” was up 7%. CBS, the longtime third-place program, was up 4%.

Although early-morning news programs usually lose some viewers when they change anchors, ratings experts say that the “Today” plunge indicates viewers are reacting emotionally to the soap opera that was played out on “Today” over the past year--from anchor Bryant Gumbel’s infamous in-house memo to NBC’s handling of the Norville hiring.

“NBC tried to fix something that fundamentally wasn’t broken,” said Janet Patterson, the director of research for WBZ-TV, an NBC affiliate in Boston. “Morning shows are a companion to viewers. They didn’t like what had happened to Jane Pauley, and they acted on it by voting with their TV dials.”

WBZ has been one of the most successful “Today” show stations, Patterson said, ranking No. 1 in the Boston market even when “Today” was No. 3 in the national Nielsen ratings. “Boston is a town of traditions, and people here have been loyal to ‘Today’ since the days of J. Fred Muggs,” she said, referring to the chimp that used to be on the show when Dave Garroway was host. But in the past few months, “Today’s” ratings in Boston have paralleled the drop in the national Nielsens.

“It seemed that the race began to heat up at about the same time as the Gumbel memo (about a year ago),” Patterson said. “But what clearly hurt us was unhappiness over Pauley.”

Gumbel’s memo, written in response to then-”Today” producer Marty Ryan’s request to evaluate the elements of the show, created a barrage of publicity after a newspaper published it because Gumbel was particularly critical of another member of the show’s on-air “family”--weatherman Willard Scott.

And when NBC executives, in a bid for younger viewers, hired Norville last year as the show’s news anchor, which ultimately led to Pauley’s stepping down as co-anchor, Norville was portrayed and perceived as a younger, blonder rival.

Rightly or wrongly, according to CBS research, the negative publicity over Gumbel’s memo and Norville’s hiring may be washing over into viewers’ perceptions of the “Today” co-hosts.

According to David Poltrack, CBS senior vice president of research and marketing, Gumbel and Norville are the only morning-news anchors who recently have shown “a significant negative component” in CBS’ tracking of audience attitudes towards the morning hosts. Noting that viewers generally rank news anchors favorably, Poltrack said that, in the case of Gumbel and Norville, a number had rated them either “fair” or “poor.”

CBS’ research also shows that viewers recently have been showing unusual signs of dial-switching among the morning shows, where “GMA” has remained stable with hosts Charles Gibson and Joan Lunden, while “CBS This Morning” has shown improvement in the ratings and has recently hired “GMA’s” news anchor Paula Zahn to replace Kathleen Sullivan as anchor with Harry Smith. As the third-place entrant in the race, Poltrack said, CBS hopes to benefit from that sampling.

At first-place “Good Morning, America,” researchers maintain that they are not merely benefiting from the bad publicity at “Today.” Noting that “GMA” had been leading “Today” among young women for some time, Alan Wurtzel, ABC’s senior vice president in charge of audience research, said, “There’s no question that Pauley’s departure has had an effect, but we were in a position to take advantage of that opportunity. We had our personalities and segments in place so that people, when they came over and looked at the show, liked what they saw.”

In an interview with Barbara Walters, scheduled to air Friday on ABC’s “20/20,” Gumbel acknowledged, “We’ve had a series of incidents that have projected the show in a poor light. And we’ve been on top for five years. That makes you a very convenient target. Between the memo, the changeover of people, there’s just been a kind of firestorm.”

Given the slow-burning nature of change in morning TV, the question for “Today” is how and when that firestorm will be put out.

Tom Capra, who took over as executive producer on Jan. 29, predicts that the program has hit the bottom of the recent ratings trend.

“I think we may have reached our low point last week,” said Tom Capra, who formerly was news director at KNBC Channel 4 in Los Angeles. “There is a lot of sampling going on, but we think viewers will rediscover us. It’s time to quit blaming Deborah Norville for Jane Pauley.”

Norville has been criticized by some TV reviewers for seeming to lack Pauley’s warmth and chemistry with Gumbel and for sometimes rushing through her interviews. Since he joined the show, Capra said, “I don’t think the program races any more--it seemed to be relentless in the past. Bryant and Deborah have more time to talk to each other. We’re exposing ourselves more to the audience.”

“Today” will travel to Los Angeles for the Oscars later this month, but Capra said that he plans no major revamp of the series or any changes in the on-air talent.