KNBC Drops Horowitz, Consumer Unit : Television: The veteran Channel 4 reporter presents his final report after the station declines to renew his contract.

KNBC-TV Channel 4 decided Friday to get rid of consumer reporter David Horowitz, a fixture at the station for nearly 20 years.

“Today, KNBC informed me it no longer wanted to maintain a consumer unit nor reporter in its news department and, for that reason, is not renewing my pending contract,” said Horowitz, who first began offering consumer reports at the station in 1973. “I am proud of my two decades of accomplishment as KNBC’s consumer reporter, a role I created there, and regret that the station’s current priorities force the closure of our unit.”

Regina Miyamoto, Channel 4 spokeswoman, said that “there was a window in David Horowitz’s contract, and KNBC has made a decision” not to renew that contract. She added that the producer who worked with Horowitz on his consumer segments will remain with the station and will be reassigned to other projects.

Through his publicist, Horowitz said that a few years ago, his department at KNBC included two producers, two researchers and two clerical workers. But he said that John Rohrbeck, former KNBC general manager who now oversees all the NBC owned-and-operated stations, had cut him back to just a single producer.

Horowitz, who presented his final report at the station Thursday, has been managing with the help of 12 unpaid, part-time interns.

Since the station hired anchor Paul Moyer to a record-breaking $8 million-plus deal last month, some KNBC news employees have expressed fear that the station would have to make cuts in other areas of its news operation to compensate for that huge expenditure. But Miyamoto said that the decision to release Horowitz was unrelated to the hiring of Moyer.

Horowitz, a veteran newsman who wrote for NBC’s “Huntley Brinkley Report” and then covered the war in Vietnam for the network, since 1973 has fielded letters and complaints from viewers about defective merchandise and scams and often used the clout of broadcast television to embarrass merchants into making good on failed promises. He also tested the claims made by advertisers in segments that were often heavy on humor.

Horowitz said that he will continue addressing the concerns of consumers in his nationally syndicated radio reports and newspaper column. The syndicated TV series, “Fight Back! With David Horowitz,” which airs on KNBC but is produced independently, recently completed its 18th and probably last season. Horowitz has also completed a pilot for a new syndicated series that will incorporate some of the elements of “Fight Back!”

Horowitz said he was uncertain whether his reports on CNBC, the NBC-owned cable network, would continue.