20 Years of Turmoil Take a Toll at KCBS News

Jim Lampley’s removal as anchor is just the latest shake-up. ‘They never stay with anything long enough to give it a chance,’ says a competing news director.

It is one of the great mysteries of local TV news.

KCBS Channel 2, which shaped the Los Angeles TV scene in its earlier years as KNXT, has for the better part of two decades trailed in the ratings and doesn’t seem to know how to regain the upper hand.

The latest upheaval came this week when Jim Lampley was removed as a nightly anchor. KCBS said he will cover the Winter Olympics in France for the station next month, and he reportedly could stay on in a sports capacity if he wants.

Not long ago, in other shake-ups, KCBS news director Jose Rios, who had barely got his feet wet in the job, was demoted, and controversial sportscaster Keith Olbermann was dropped.

And, once again, parent network CBS has sent in a fresh high-level team--general manager Steve Gigliotti and news director John Lippman, a brand-new arrival from Seattle--to try to turn the station around.

Without Lampley, the anchors who now have been named to front the KCBS nightly news operation are his wife, Bree Walker, Tritia Toyota, Michael Tuck and Chris Conangla.

But unless KCBS finally learns a lesson that has been proven again and again--that familiarity breeds ratings, as in the case of KTLA Channel 5 anchor Hal Fishman--the upheavals and new managers will have no more effect than those of the past.

With the exception of a few good general managers and news directors who remembered what Channel 2 once meant to Los Angeles--going back to Jerry Dunphy and “The Big News” in the 1960s--it is difficult to remember a station that has so thoroughly forgotten its roots.

Here is a station that, even as it began to decline, probably had more residual good will than any competitor in town. It was the Los Angeles station of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. It was the station that helped set a national pattern with its expanded nightly broadcasts of “The Big News.”

So what happened?

“There was no sense that the station had a soul and identity that had to be protected,” says a knowledgeable former employee of KCBS.

“They let people like Jess Marlow and Dunphy and (political reporter) Linda Douglass get away. And the decline of the station now has coincided with the decline of revenues in the industry as a whole, as well as the misfortunes of the CBS network. So it’s hard to fix things.”

“They never stay with anything long enough to give it a chance,” says Jeff Wald, former news director of KTLA and now head of news for KCOP Channel 13. “The news business is habit--a reason for KTLA’s success.”

Singling out Rios’ situation, Wald said he wasn’t given sufficient chance “to turn around an operation that has been in decline for 20 years. It’s a shame. They have some wonderful people over there but they don’t pay attention to past history.”

While TV newscasters often play musical chairs, the turnover of talent at KCBS--both on-air and in management--is notorious, although certainly no more notorious than last week’s shocking dismissal by KNBC Channel 4 of the respected veteran reporter John Marshall.

In cold-blooded ratings terms-- and cold-blooded seems an appropriate term after the Marshall case--KCBS’ network competitors, KABC Channel 7 and KNBC, have been more successful because of the focused management, formats and recognizable faces that were given time to develop into specific station identities.

On the other hand, the names seem to come and go at Channel 2. Dunphy was the most famous departure. When the station let him get away, he went to KABC and helped build that channel’s ratings supremacy before moving on to KCAL Channel 9.

Then for a while in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Connie Chung helped give Channel 2 an agreeable, respectable, middle-road identity, as did an independent-minded general manager, Van Gordon Sauter, and a news team that had a solid fix on both the past and present.

Chung left for a network job. But others who have come and gone at Channel 2 include Gary Franklin, Jim Hill, Marcia Brandwynne, Colleen Williams, Kevin O’Connell, Terry Murphy, Ralph Story, Joseph Benti, Warren Olney, John Schubeck, Ross Becker, Sandy Hill, Brent Musburger (a sports reporter-turned-anchor, like Lampley) and Paula Zahn, who left KCBS to join her husband back East and now is co-anchor of “CBS This Morning.”

At the moment, Toyota is by far KCBS’ most familiar face and a primary asset for the embattled station.

But KABC has such longtime local anchors as Paul Moyer, Ann Martin and Christine Lund, back from retirement. And Kelly Lange and Marlow are the top anchors at KNBC, while weatherman Fritz Coleman and sportscaster Fred Roggin head a strong bench of younger reporters who typify the station’s yuppification--at the expense of such veterans as Marshall and, before him, Jack Perkins, Nick Clooney, Warren Wilson and Jim Brown.

For CBS, the success of KCBS is important because the tune-in by viewers in the huge Los Angeles market can influence the ratings of the network’s nightly Dan Rather newscast.

And yet for years, KCBS inexplicably has not even provided its on-air talent with a set or lighting that matches the attractive visual qualities of KABC and KNBC news. The competing network stations “do look better,” says the former KCBS employee.

The worst thing that happened to KCBS in recent years was its disastrous “news wheel” that lasted just a few weeks in 1986--a format of fast-moving, rotating 20-minute segments with alternating anchors. The only trouble was, there was virtually no news. Viewers weren’t fooled and tuned out in droves. The general manager in charge departed. And KCBS has never really recovered from playing catch-up.