‘The Mouse Got Lucky This Time’ : Television: While Disney-owned KCAL Channel 9 celebrates the first anniversary of its three-hour newscast, with ratings boosted by the Gulf War, some critics doubt the station can keep it up over the long haul.

A once-popular slogan proclaims: “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” But for KCAL Channel 9, war has been just what the doctor ordered.

As the station this week celebrated the first anniversary of its much-ballyhooed, three-hour, prime-time newscast, station executives and competitors alike credited the war against Iraq with doing for Disney-owned KCAL exactly what President Bush claims it has done for the United States: boosted morale at home and established credibility abroad.

“The mouse got lucky this time,” said Randy Reiss, executive vice president of Walt Disney Studios. Reiss effusively explained that most viewers watch the same newscast week in and week out and that such habits are extremely difficult for a newcomer to break.

“So sometimes you can spend all this money on news that people simply don’t see,” he said. “But because of fires and the war, people were flipping around and they did have a chance to find us.”

Ratings for KCAL’s newscasts soared as U.S. bombers began dropping their deadly cargo on Baghdad in January, especially for the station’s 8 and 9 p.m. broadcasts, which face no news competition on any local station. Throughout most nights of the war, for the nearly 50% of Southern California homes that are not wired for cable TV and thus do not have access to CNN, KCAL was the only TV news source available at those hours. During the February sweeps, Nielsen ratings for each of these newscasts jumped about 30%, or 50,000 homes, over what they were last November.

Reiss said that if the station maintains the February ratings, the operation will turn a profit in the year to come. Disney reportedly spent about $30 million to get the KCAL news off the ground.

Competitors point out, however, that KCAL’s February ratings were spiked by enormous numbers on heavy news nights, such as Feb. 27, when President Bush declared a halt to the war. KCAL’s cumulative audience for the three-hour newscast that night was nearly double its average for the previous four weeks.

And while the station’s 10 p.m. broadcast last month was also up some 25,000 households over last November, it still drew less than half the audience earned by KTLA Channel 5’s perennially top-rated newscast.

Still, enthusiasm and congratulations, buoyed by KCAL’s receiving the Southern California Radio and Television News Directors award for best hourlong newscast last January, abounded on the occasion of the broadcast’s first birthday.

“I’m thrilled with what we have accomplished,” said Jim Saunders, the station’s acting general manager. “I would have rather that some of the incidents that helped us become part of the public menu had been less harmful. It’s no secret that our peaks came with the Santa Barbara fires and the war. But we knew going in that that is the way newscasts build. You either make it or break it on big stories. If you are not on top of it, you lose credibility. And if you are on top of it, you build it.”

“We have really gone out of our way to provide thorough coverage of all major stories, whatever they are: drought, fires, (last week’s) rain storms or the war in the Gulf,” said Bob Henry, KCAL’s news director. “I think people are getting that message. Now we are at the point that when there is big news, people come to us.”

Executives at competing stations are more skeptical, expressing doubts about the quality of the station’s newscasts and whether it will remain viable in peace time over the long haul. Even so, most competitors agreed that in one year, despite cleaning out nearly the entire news staff at what was called KHJ-TV before Disney purchased the station at the end of 1988 and changed its name, KCAL has succeeded in creating a “credible newscast.”

“They had a great and unexpected opportunity when (Iraq President Saddam) Hussein went into Kuwait last August,” said Robert Hyland, general manager at KCBS Channel 2. “They dispatched (KCAL anchorman) David Jackson over there and it gave them some instant credibility. They have a much cleaner image than they ever had before.”

Hyland explained that a credible news operation is essential to the survival of any local station these days because it is the one programming area that truly reaches out to serve local viewers and can thus help build longstanding attachments. But both Hyland and Warren Cereghino, news director at KTLA, denied that KCAL was over the hump in terms of securing a large enough audience to make the venture profitable or to silence the naysayers.

“Certainly, for all the effort they have put into it, I don’t think they have had much impact in the market in terms of building ratings points,” Cereghino said. “They certainly haven’t taken any viewers away from us. They do well on extraordinarily heavy news nights, but the rest of the time they founder.”

Hyland added that with the addition of KCAL’s newscasts--the station also airs morning and noon newscasts and, since the war, has been carrying an 11 p.m. report as well--local advertisers have a glut of newscasts to choose from and are able, given the recession, to negotiate sweet deals. In other words, area stations are not raking in the premium ad rates on news programs that they once were able to charge, Hyland said, and it probably will take even higher ratings than Disney anticipated for KCAL to reach the black.

KCAL and Disney executives concede that their news ratings are likely to settle back a bit now that the war is over, but Reiss insisted that the station is exceeding expectations by far and vowed that Disney will stick with the news operation.

“We’ll fall back a little as the general appetite for news diminishes,” Saunders said. “But we will fall back to a higher base than we had before. I don’t think crisis is necessary for this thing to work. Our product is solid and I think it will transcend any crisis.”

Despite KCAL’s best newscast award, some competitors find fault with its product, calling it “repetitive” and “threadbare.” Cereghino criticized the bright, splashy graphic look the KCAL employs, while Jeff Wald, news director at KCOP Channel 13, which is currently in last place among newscasts at 10 p.m., said that KCAL’s reports were often filled with fluff.

“I still applaud them for doing the three hours,” Wald said, “but I feel that execution-wise it is a bore. There’s a lot of repetition and an emphasis on style over substance. I watched David Jackson’s report from Jordan the other night and it was rambling and stale. Another time, when the bikini ban took place in Palm Springs, I watched them try to set up this ridiculous live debate between a city official and two USC co-eds. It was embarrassing.”

Even on some big stories, KCAL has dropped the ball. When two planes crashed on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport last month, Reiss said that KCAL did not immediately cover the tragedy like Channels 2, 4, 7 and 13 did because by the time the station’s helicopter arrived on the scene, air traffic controllers would not allow it to fly close enough to shoot adequate pictures of the wreckage.

“We just were unlucky, but they’ll be times when our chopper gets there first,” Henry said. And he countered any criticism by declaring that with viewer call-in segments, polling segments, graphics and unconventional use of live capabilities--such as the time KCAL put cameras inside and outside a tank to illustrate how it works in combat--”KCAL has become the market leader for innovation and creative improvments in television news.”

As for the future, Reiss said that Disney had planned on losing money for several years and that the station’s progress, even if inflated by war, has “amazed” him. “It is remarkable that in less than a year we have gone from nothing to what we have done,” Reiss said.

“I wish I could tell you something that has gone badly as a concession so that you will believe all the upside, but I really can’t think of anything,” Reiss said. “We obviously have a ways to go. We have to keep pushing the innovations and perfecting what we have done so far. Keep making it better. But even if the ratings drop a bit, there’s no question that we are here to stay.”

KCAL NEWS GROWTH

Sweeps Ratings for KCAL Channel 9 News

TIME MAY ’90 JULY NOV. FEB. ’91 8 p.m. 3.0 3.4 3.5 4.4 9 p.m. 2.5 3.0 3.0 4.0 10 p.m. 2.0 2.1 2.1 2.6 TOTAL 7.5 8.5 8.6 11.0

Note: Each rating point in May and July represented 49,315 homes. In November and February, it was 50,236 homes. SOURCE: A.C. Nielsen Co.