KNBC Wins Quake Coverage Ratings Race

Getting on the air first after Sunday’s early-morning earthquake boosted KCBS Channel 2 to a huge lead in the television ratings, but growing viewer curiosity after the second shaker helped KNBC Channel 4 jump ahead for most of the day.

The earthquake sent millions of Los Angeles area residents scrambling out of bed and straight to their TV sets. In the moments preceding the quake, only about 360,000 of this area’s nearly 5 million households had their television sets turned on, but by 5 a.m., just two minutes after the quake and before any station had interrupted regular programming with any kind of news, viewers in an estimated 1.4 million homes were gathered before the tube, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co.

Channel 2 threw reporter Jodi Baskerville on the air at about 5:15 a.m., and though she and her colleagues could relay little firm information about the size or location of the magnitude 7.4 quake, about 935,000 households or about one-fifth of all the homes in the Los Angeles area watched for whatever news they could scrape together.

Part of that information included reporters Harvey Levin and Hosea Sanders speculating that the flashing lights they had seen during the quake from the balconies of their homes might have been some kind of emergency warning system. In fact, those mysterious flashes were created either by exploding electrical transformers or the sparks created when swaying power lines collide.

KCBS’ quick action earned the station a massive 67% of all those tuned in to television at that early hour, but as other stations got news reports on the air, Channel 2’s lead evaporated. The audience on all stations combined jumped to a whopping 2.7 million households after the 6.5 quake near Big Bear just after 8 a.m. That was about 2 1/2 times as many viewers as were watching television the previous Sunday at that hour.

KNBC Channel 4 then leaped into a hefty lead. KABC Channel 7, this market’s usual ratings champ, finished third for its entire 6 1/2 hours of morning reports. KNBC, which had trailed KABC badly in ratings during the rioting in April and May, also grabbed the most viewers for its late-afternoon special reports on the two quakes, but those numbers were buoyed by big ratings for NBC’s coverage of the U.S. Olympic basketball “Dream Team’s” first game.

Nancy Valenta, Channel 4’s news director, attributed her station’s sizable advantage to her decision to stay with quake coverage longer than any of her competitors both in the morning and afternoon. She also said that KNBC’s helicopter had the first pictures of the damage in Yucca Valley, and David Garcia, who lives near Caltech in Pasadena, was the first reporter to reach the seismology lab there.