State of Address Coverage: It’ll Be Spotty : Television: Stations plan excerpts and taped showings, but Gov. Wilson’s speech won’t be aired live today.

Unlike a year ago, none of the seven local VHF television stations were planning as of Tuesday afternoon to air live complete coverage of today’s State of the State address by Gov. Pete Wilson.

KCAL-TV Channel 9, which last year preempted an “I Dream of Jeannie” rerun for the speech, decided this year that it would be “best covered within the context of its regularly scheduled newscasts,” a station spokeswoman said.

The 5 p.m. speech, expected to be about 20 minutes long, will be shown at 2:35 a.m. by KNBC-TV Channel 4 and at 11 a.m. Thursday on the California Channel, a public-affairs network carried by some cable systems throughout the state.

The California Channel cannot show the address live because it ends its broadcast day at 4 p.m.

Radio stations KABC-AM (790), KFI-AM (640) and KNX-AM (1070) do plan live coverage of the address.

KCBS-TV Channel 2 plans to show about five minutes of the speech during its 5 p.m. newscast, and a wrap-up and the Democratic response at 6 p.m.

There was no live complete television coverage of Wilson’s address in 1992, although KNBC-TV Channel 4 carried it on a delayed basis at 2:05 a.m. and KSCI-TV Channel 18 showed it at 6 p.m. interpreted into Mandarin Chinese.

KCAL’s live coverage in 1993 earned the station praise from the governor’s office and in academic circles, but attracted few viewers. The station was the lowest rated in the market during the half hour of Wilson’s speech. Its 2.8 rating was dwarfed by newscasts on the three major network owned-and-operated stations and by an episode of “Batman: The Animated Series,” on KTTV-TV Channel 11.

To Jeff Wald, the news director at KCOP-TV Channel 13, the “overriding” reason for the live coverage shutout is economics.

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“In this market, the (level of) advertising dollars are not where they used to be,” Wald said. “If you lose 20-25 minutes of air time, unless it’s something that’s really earthshaking like an earthquake or something that affects a lot of the population, a political address is probably better served on the 10 o’clock news.”

Wald said he would have considered airing Wilson’s address in its entirety on the 10 p.m. newscast if it were shorter and the governor’s comments newsworthy.

The station took a similar approach to Michael Jackson’s satellite-delivered denial of child molestation accusations last month.

Larry L. Berg, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, does not find the lack of live coverage unusual.

“Outside of something horrendous happening,” Berg said, “the stations never cover Sacramento anyway, and when they do, they send somebody up there who doesn’t know as much about Sacramento as the people who are up there all the time.”