Independents Gear Up to Cover the Gulf Crisis : Television: New technology and broader ambitions now allow local stations to produce their own, serious coverage of the big story.

The march of television technology has done something extraordinary for independent TV stations: It has allowed them to seriously cover world events.

Their newsrooms newly filled with employees and equipment, news at Los Angeles’ four major independents has come a long way from the days when local and especially world events were relegated to five-minute updates between reruns of “Leave it to Beaver” and “The Munsters.”

Coverage of the crisis in the Persian Gulf is a case in point.

At KCAL-TV Channel 9, fully a third of the station’s new three-hour prime-time newscast has been devoted to the events in the gulf since the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait. The station dispatched its own reporter, David Jackson, to the Middle East, and since Aug. 6 it has preempted regular programming each weeknight at 11 p.m. to present a half-hour nightly special, “The Persian Gulf Crisis.”

KTTV Channel 11, which is owned by Fox Broadcasting, started its own half-hour Persian Gulf special last week. Preempting “MASH” at 7 p.m., the program is organized according to a traditional news format, and executives at the station hope to continue to use that air time for news and analysis after the crisis in the gulf is settled.

“It’s a big change from five years ago, even more so from 10 years ago,” said Warren Cereghino, news director at KTLA-TV Channel 5. At one time, Cereghino said, independents were shut out from covering world and national events--even statewide news--because, unlike stations affiliated with ABC, NBC or CBS, they had neither networks nor sister stations on which to rely for out of town news.

Now, all four of Los Angeles’ major independents have relationships with Cable News Network, and most also subscribe to video news services such as VizNews, which is owned by Reuters, or World Television Network. With satellite feeds now available to and from just about anywhere, independent stations can run the same stories that a network station can--or send their own reporters and beam their stories home over a cooperating organization’s satellite.

In the past, said Jeff Wald, news director at KCOP Channel 13, “the sources that the independents had (for out-of-town news) were UPI and another news feed service called ITNA. It was mostly footage that was several days old that we would have to put on the air and be also-rans while the network was on live. But now with satellite, everyone can purchase certain services.”

With the increase in access to footage has come a desire for increased access to sources. And while George Bush and Saddam Hussein may not be lining up for interviews on KCOP and KTLA, many in the tier of pundits that lies between actual players and strictly local sources have made themselves available.

The changes in access are contiguous with well-publicized shifts in the market. Spurred mostly by the advent of cable and a corresponding rise in the programming strength of independent broadcast stations, television has become decentralized. Organizations that never before attempted to provide a full plate of services have begun to do so, and the result is that audience perceptions about when and where to look for programming are changing.

“We are programming as if we are the only television-based information the viewer will see that day,” said Dick Tuininga, news director at KTTV.

The station’s daily 7 p.m. Persian Gulf special is designed to provide an update of the day’s events in the region, Tuininga said, and is produced under the assumption that viewers may have read a newspaper in the morning or listened to the radio on the way to work, but have not yet sat down to watch the evening news. The program begins with a rundown of the day’s major events in headline form, and then presents longer stories and interviews on selected topics.

And KTTV is not the only independent that is trying to broaden its news programming, particularly in the wake of the crisis in the gulf.

“We are trying to be a primary news source,” said KCOP news director Wald. “We tried to be an alternative newscast, to cover other items than the network stations, but I feel that when people turn on our news at 10 p.m. they want the entire full meal.”

And with ratings in the wake of the situation in the gulf and growing U.S. involvement there up across the board for news in the wake up, the independents appear to be succeeding.

Neilsen ratings for one night last week, for example, showed KTLA’s 10 p.m. newscast leading all local news programs with a 7.0 rating for the hour. That was just slightly higher that the top-drawing network affiliate, KNBC Channel 4, which came in with a 6.9 rating for its 11 p.m. cast.

The independents have focused much their coverage of the gulf crisis on local angles and issues. Even KCAL reporter Jackson, who has been based in the Middle East since the invasion began, is under orders not to break big national stories but to find what his producers believe are “Southern California stories”: Jackson is to interview soldiers from California, examine military equipment that was made here, and so on.

“We’ve tried to do our best in finding the local angles, and in showing the other side of the story,” said KCOP’s Wald. “There was a poll that showed 86% of the people are behind Bush--but there’s still that 14% of the people who don’t think we should have our noses there at all. The opposition may just be a handful of people, but I still think it’s incumbent upon us to present their side.”

KCOP, with news ambitions on the order of stations like KCAL and KTTV, has another reason for holding back on the national story--the new equipment meant to upgrade the station’s news facilities, and the new budget to back it up, just didn’t arrive in time for the Iraq story.

In a sense, the independent newscasts--scrapping with the networks and their local affiliates, some with the budget to go to Cairo and some defiantly covering issues and events back home--are bringing back the days when a city like Los Angeles had not one but half a dozen newspapers, all vying for attention, coming out at different times of day, failing and succeeding in covering the story and--perhaps most important--engaging their own particular audiences.

“We used to think that the network was coming on so we didn’t have to cover the story that much--but I don’t think that’s why people watch news,” said Larry Perrett, executive producer at KCAL. “People just want to know what’s going on in the world.”