Newscast Experiment Simmers : Television: KCAL’s three-hour, prime-time news show fails to draw a significant audience during its first four weeks.

Southern California viewers responded to the first month of KCAL Channel 9’s three-hour, prime-time newscast--the first such broadcast of its kind in the nation--as they would to yet another sunny, smoggy day: They barely noticed.

The Disney-owned station, which reportedly spent $30 million on personnel and equipment to launch the novel news experiment, averaged a 2.3 rating for the first four weeks of prime-time news, according to the A. C. Nielsen Co.--or about 113,000 households a night out of the total 4.9 million television households in the Los Angeles viewing area.

Local news analysts have estimated that the broadcast will have to average between 200,000 and 300,000 homes every night just to break even.

“I’m not going to talk about the ratings,” said Jim Saunders, KCAL’s station manager, in an interview this morning. “It takes years to build real ratings results. Anyone who thinks it can be done in a month is a damn fool. No news product is ever a failure or a success at four weeks. It’s not like a game show. ‘Wheel of Fortune’ was a success after 90 days. No news show can do that.”

“So far there are no surprises,” said Randy Reiss, executive vice president of Walt Disney Studios. “I can say unequivocally that there is no panic over here, no second thoughts.”

Disney has pledged its long-term support of the prime-time newscast, and the company’s executives never expected an overnight success, but the first months’ results do not indicate that news on KCAL has begun to build any kind of a following.

Only 4% of the available audience in prime time chose to tune in. By contrast, movies on independent competitors KTLA, KTTV and KCOP all averaged a 7% share of the audience, while network programming on KABC and KNBC each grabbed 21% of the local viewers, and KCBS received 15% of the prime-time audience. The remaining 18% of the audience watched UHF stations or cable channels.

KCAL’s news audience also dropped off significantly as each evening wore on. The 8 p.m. hour, anchored by Jerry Dunphy and Jane Velez-Mitchell, was seen in almost 150,000 homes a night. But the 9 p.m. newscast, featuring David Jackson and Pat Harvey, lost nearly one-third of those viewers, and the 10 p.m. broadcast, which is anchored by Dunphy and Harvey and faces direct news competition from Channels 5, 11 and 13, lost more than 30,000 more, slipping all the way down to a 1.6 rating, or about 79,000 homes each night.

That 10 p.m. broadcast finished last among the four independent stations’ competing newscasts, about 143,000 viewers a night behind top-ranked KTLA.