Nostalgia Is Big News at Channel 2 : Television: As Jerry Dunphy joins George Fischbeck this week, KCBS hopes the return of the veteran newscaster will help solve its news-ratings troubles.

Jerry Dunphy. George Fischbeck. While just about everything else has changed in Southern California over the past 30 years, KCBS-TV Channel 2 has turned to a couple of aging local fixtures to help bolster its news ratings.

Fischbeck, 72, the longtime weatherman at KABC-TV Channel 7, joined KCBS last November to contribute feature stories. Dunphy, 74, after five years at KCAL-TV Channel 9, will begin co-anchoring the 5 p.m. newscast on Thursday--rejoining the station after a 20-year absence in which Channel 2 has had nothing but woes in the local news ratings.

“It confounds me,” said Irwin Safchik, a former news director at KNBC-TV Channel 4. “I can only conclude that it is part of an image make-over following all the hard times, the bad times they’ve been through for all these years. Somehow, someone there thinks, ‘Hey, maybe if we try to restore ourselves in the image of the glory days of ‘The Big News,’ that will do the trick.’ ”

Dunphy, who began his Los Angeles broadcasting career at Channel 2 in 1960, fronted “The Big News” at what was then KNXT--the first hourlong local newscast in the country and to this day revered by many purists as broadcast journalism’s finest local show. Not only was the newscast dedicated to quality reporting--free of, as Dunphy puts it, “the flimflam and froth” that have marred more recent local newscasts here--it also drew enormous ratings, more than double what today’s best-rated newscasts score.

Channel 2’s dominance lasted throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s. But vigorous competition from the other two network-owned stations--KNBC and KABC--sliced into Channel 2’s lead and, by 1975, the station decided Dunphy was expendable. He skipped up the dial to Channel 7, remaining there for 14 years and helping to boost the station to No. 1 for most of his run.

Since his departure, despite uncountable changes in management, anchors and news philosophy, Channel 2 has continued to languish as the also-ran in local news, trailing both Channels 7 and 4.

“Jerry has always been one of the best news readers in the city,” said Joe Saltzman, professor of broadcast journalism at USC, who worked with Dunphy as a news writer and producer on “The Big News.” “And the chance to try to capture the glory of the past may not be a bad idea. . . . I know there are viewers out there who like that sentimental, historical look back, and their promotion of him, showing him as a young man, is geared to them, to that continuity with the past. But let’s face it, those people are a dwindling minority.”

William Applegate, KCBS’ general manager who has orchestrated the station’s acquisition of several well-known news personalities in the past year, denied that the station was simply trying to “sell nostalgia.”

“What we’re trying to do, and what we’ve done with Ann Martin as well, is to bring the most experienced, credible and recognizable people who are part of Southern California to this television station so that when the audience tunes us in, they see people they know and have trusted for many years,” Applegate said. “Jerry is part of the fabric of this town.”

And that familiarity, Channel 2 management believes, will translate into higher ratings quicker than bringing in anchors from out of town. Besides Dunphy, Martin and Fischbeck, Applegate also has brought in former KNBC anchor Linda Alvarez.

“We want to win,” said Larry Perret, KCBS news director since last September, who worked with Dunphy for five years at KCAL. “And you can’t do that overnight and you can’t do that just by bringing in some new anchors. You have to win by building your product, step by step, and one way to do that is with the stories you cover and how you execute them, and the other is to get people to deliver the news that the audience is comfortable with. These anchors have been around for a long time. People know them, they grew up with them, they believe in them. That’s a big asset to have if you can get it.”

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But getting Dunphy, who will turn 75 in June, is not necessarily the slam dunk that Perret’s prescription might suggest. First, though he might be the most well-known anchor in Los Angeles, many news observers cite his jump from KABC to KCAL in 1989 as one of the definitive examples of the theory that anchors, no matter how familiar, do not drag many viewers with them when they jump to a new station.

Though Dunphy served KCAL’s purposes by providing its fledgling news operation instant credibility and promotional cache, his ratings were anything but extraordinary. His 10 p.m. broadcast there has consistently finished third behind KTLA-TV Channel 5 and KTTV-TV Channel 11. His 6:30 p.m. newscast drew hardly anyone and was canceled quickly.

Applegate said that Dunphy’s numbers in prime time on an independent station really have no bearing on how he might do on the 5 p.m. newscast on Channel 2: “He did very well as counter-programming in prime time. You’re comparing apples and oranges to say he didn’t do the same kind of number there as he would at 11 p.m. on a network station.”

Another problem is demographics. Most television managers continually talk about the young adult categories--ages 18 to 49 and 25 to 54--as the audience advertisers prize most of all, yet few of those viewers are likely to remember “The Big News.”

Applegate is unconcerned. People under 30, he said, rarely watch news, and the audience composition for the afternoon newscasts where Dunphy will work “is overwhelmingly 55 and older, and those are the people that grew up watching him.”

Dunphy argues that he’s been a winner everywhere he’s gone. He took third-place KABC to the top in the ‘70s within three years of his arrival there, anchoring three newscasts a day for a time. And, he said, while most “so-called experts” thought KCAL’s three-hour prime-time newscast was “a crazy idea,” it not only survived but has done better than anyone could have predicted.

Dunphy said he expects to be back on top at Channel 2 before his three-year contract ends.

“And who would think at my age they would invest in me to help do that? How did I get so lucky? I guess it’s simply because my name has been all over town, my picture’s been all over the place after all these years. Either on purpose or by accident, people have found me on the tube. It’s not bad.”