KNBC Climbs Aboard the Oprah Bandwagon : Television: Her top-rated talk show airs on KABC, but that’s not keeping Channel 4 from doing a weeklong series of news reports on her--it’s ‘sweeps’ month.

From the “if you can’t beat ‘em, exploit ‘em” file: In a move that even the station’s news director calls “unorthodox,” KNBC-TV Channel 4 is doing a five-part news series beginning today on Oprah Winfrey--whose talk show airs on archrival KABC-TV Channel 7.

And whose hefty ratings leading into KABC’s afternoon newscasts have been cited by many local news experts as a key reason that station has reigned in recent years as the No. 1 news station here.

Though focusing on another network’s entertainment product is not unprecedented--just about every local station recently aired stories on MTV’s “Beavis and Butt-head,” for example--KNBC’s Oprah series for the November ratings “sweeps” is “pretty amazing,” observed Jeff Wald, news director at KCOP-TV Channel 13, which sometimes reviews TV shows on competing channels.

“Unorthodox, it may be,” conceded KNBC news director Mark Hoffman, but completely justified nonetheless.

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“I just think Oprah is such a phenomenon that her celebrity transcends normal television competitive boundaries,” Hoffman said. “I think she is a force in popular culture. She’s one of the highest-paid performers in the industry and she has a huge impact on society almost every day. That’s news.”

Five days’ worth. Beginning today, KNBC’s 5 p.m. newscast will present separate pieces on “Her Secret Past,” “Oprah Mania,” “People Whose Lives She’s Changed,” “The Oprah Empire: Spending $80 Million a Year” and “Her Very Private Life.”

Though Hoffman downplays the competitive motivations, he admitted that “it would be a fair statement” to say KNBC is trying to capitalize on her huge ratings in the 3-4 p.m. period while blunting the benefits derived by KABC.

On the first day of the month-long “sweeps” last week, for example, “Oprah” drew 27% of the available audience at 3 p.m. while KNBC’s “Sally Jessy Raphael” attracted 10%. That advantage gives KABC’s newscasts a big lead over all others right from the start, Hoffman said.

“I do hope that the series pulls some of their viewers over to us,” Hoffman said. “But that isn’t the motivation. You always want to do impact pieces that people find interesting and thereby compel them to watch. And Oprah is interesting. She speaks to millions and millions every day on a wide range of topics that clearly have an effect on her audience.”

Wald sees nothing wrong with KNBC’s strategy, pointing out that most stations tend to do too much on their own programs. KNBC, for example, featured an interview with Jerry Seinfeld on its 11 p.m. news Thursday, less than two hours after having broadcast his sitcom.

But the “Oprah” series, he added, is symptomatic of the competitive environment that exists in a market where all seven VHF stations have invested heavily in their local news efforts.

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“This appears to be a preemptive strike against their primary competitor to try to take some of those ‘Oprah’ viewers away from Channel 7,” Wald said. “And it just shows how competitive local news has become. You have stations grasping at anything they can think of to grab an audience that is becoming more and more split between all the competing programming. We are all so desperate to get as much of that audience as we can, all bets are off.”

Wald said that part of the reason he finds KNBC’s move surprising is that, in profiling Winfrey, Channel 4 could very well turn more viewers on to her KABC show. But he said the station might have decided “Oprah” wins so handily already that the extra promotion couldn’t make it any worse.

“That is where the competitive angle comes in and probably why something like this is not done very often,” KNBC’s Hoffman said. “I suppose that it may help ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ but the fact is we’re doing it anyway.”

KABC news director Roger Bell could not be reached for comment.