COMMENTARY : Stations Fail to Gain a Vote of Confidence : Television: After 15 hours of election coverage and a variety of glitches, ‘interesting’ reporting finished last.

From the desert to the sea, Jerry Dunphy is the old pro of TV news pros, and commanding the anchor desk through 4 hours and 45 minutes Tuesday night and into Wednesday, he never lost his sparkle. All the hairs on the great white mane were in place.

But there was one moment of great revelation, about 12:20 a.m. Wednesday when KCAL Channel 9 came up to a commercial break. Dunphy, in either an incredible moment of candor or a slip of the veteran tongue, asked us to stay around: “We’re gonna stick with this and make it interesting.”

He and co-anchor Pat Harvey stuck with it until their close at 12:45, winning the marathon trophy. But through about 15 hours of collective California election coverage across nine L.A. stations Tuesday night, interesting ran a distant last.

Through assorted glitches, including computer problems in the vote counting, it was a hard night for the telereporters.

How hard was it?

The first hours after the polls closed were spent with only a few votes in, so visual displays on the screen showed no percentage, as in “0%,” for the number of precincts counted. One anchor reported sagely, “It’s too close to call yet.”

In effect, the coverage was a dress rehearsal for The Big One in the fall. KCAL tried split-screen conversations with the anchor team and two other locations--and pity poor, bruised Kate Sullivan, reporting from San Francisco. She kept getting stepped on by one to three people talking over her at the same time.

Few of the reporters were “sourced” inside the political camps to know what was going on beyond “what I heard people saying in the crowd.” Many of them seemed unprepared, asking questions like “What do you have to say to that?”

Granted, it’s tedium waiting around the victory celebration at the hotel ballroom three hours before the candidate shows up. And then later, still waiting, you have to outshout the orchestra, again reporting that nothing is happening. But that doesn’t dissuade television, which doesn’t follow the good old axiom of the journalism business that no news is no news. There is time to be filled.

At 8 p.m. on the button, the polls closed and most of the stations broke in to declare Dianne Feinstein the winner in the Democratic gubernatorial race on the basis of a plethora of exit polls, although nobody ever said who was polled where. KCBS Channel 2 ran a news “crawl” across the action at the Detroit-Portland game.

From then on it was, as they used to say in vaudeville, vamping for time.

Dave Lopez at KCBS reported that Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, the Feinstein foe, was eating at a Chinese restaurant across from the Biltmore Hotel.

Everybody had at least one interview with the ubiquitous Arlo Smith, who was edging Ira Reiner for the Democratic state attorney general nomination. Every time he was asked, every time Smith insisted that his campaign wasn’t dirty.

On KTLA Channel 5, librarian Burgess Meredith was being sentenced to death by the State in an old “Twilight Zone” episode because there were no books left in the world anyway and he was redundant.

On KABC Channel 7, Roseanne was nervous about an interview for a job.

KTTV Channel 11 co-anchor Dennis Morgino did a featurette about a possible “gender gap,” Feinstein being a woman and all. But it was obviously prepared ahead of time and was a dead dog by that time of the evening.

KNBC Channel 4, anchored by Jess Marlow and Linda Alvarez, had the spriteliest visuals for its vote tallies and probably the most solid coverage (political editor Linda Douglass came off as the savviest of the night). They did, however, leave Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Wilson’s victory speech a little early for commercials for Cadillac dealers and 7-11 Super Big Gulps.

KCOP Channel 13 was tardy getting to the Van de Kamp concession speech because sportscaster Vic (The Brick) Jacobs was in mid-rampage on his Dodgers and Angels pronouncements and probably couldn’t be stopped.

At about 11, when Feinstein took the podium for her victory speech, KTLA had gone to “Cheers”; KCOP broadcast a bit of her and then jumped into “The Arsenio Hall Show” five minutes late,

KCBS left about midnight for “Rescue 911.” KCAL’s “Prime 9 News” departed at 12:45 a.m. for a commercial for the “Hot Party Line” (“99 cents a call”) and an episode of “T.J. Hooker.” KNBC’s last report came from by-now-shirt-sleeved Bill Lagatutta, who was hanging with a few leftovers and the janitorial crew at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco, Feinstein headquarters. It rolled credits at 1 a.m.

The staff seemed pretty much in a fading mode at KABC Channel 7. Co-anchor Ann Martin was trying to make a point when whoever was operating her camera seemed to fall off a stool and Martin’s image began darting up and down and around the screen.

At 1:05 a.m., Channel 7 bailed out after Martin and Harold Greene looked at their notes and shrugged that they had covered about everything.

By this time Arlo Smith was all out of media and probably went home to bed.