They Get the Ratings but Not the Attention : Television: Anchors Laura Diaz and Paul Dandridge finish some ratings periods as the top-rated newscast of the six KABC offers each weekday. So why the low profile?

They aren’t Ann Martin, Jerry Dunphy or Paul Moyer, all of whom abandoned them and their station for multimillion-dollar contracts elsewhere. They aren’t even the top dogs in their own newsroom.

But they don’t lose--not even when one of their rivals threw the considerably richer and more famous tandem of Dan Rather and Connie Chung up against them.

“I thought that when KCBS switched [Rather and Chung] to 6 p.m. against us that they might have done better than they have,” said Paul Dandridge, who, with Laura Diaz, make up KABC-TV Channel 7’s relatively anonymous but formidable 6 p.m. anchor team. “But I’ve covered more stories in Southern California than either Dan Rather or Connie Chung. Maybe that’s it.”

In the May ratings sweeps, for example, KABC’s duo won the time period, trouncing “The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung” on KCBS-TV Channel 2 by more than 300,000 homes. (Chung has since been removed from the CBS broadcast.) The duo has been on top consistently for about three years, finishing some key ratings periods, such as last February, as the top-rated of the six newscasts KABC produces each weekday.

Audience appeal notwithstanding, Dandridge and Diaz concede with hearty chuckles that they aren’t making anywhere near the money CBS doles out to its superstar anchors, or even as much as Jess Marlow, KNBC’s veteran 6 p.m. anchor whom they regularly beat.

“We keep doing the job every night, and we haven’t attracted the spotlight like some of these other people you’ve mentioned, but we work really hard. We love to tell a story, love to collect a story, and we’ve been a success. A quiet success, I guess you could say,” Diaz said.

“But it’s such a capricious business trying to figure out why people watch one newscast over another,” she continued. “It could be something as bizarre as how your hair looks on that day to a particularly strong signal in Covina. We’d like to believe it’s because we put on a quality newscast and do it in a concise, comprehensive half-hour.”

Diaz and Dandridge both speculate that many people in their audience have just arrived home from work and prefer a live, up-to-the-minute local newscast rather than a broader national newscast that was taped three hours earlier in New York.

“That has given us a bump, I think, because prior to 6 p.m. so many people are still on the freeway, and ours is the last half-hour local newscast until late in the evening,” Diaz said. “And I think since both Paul and I are reporters first rather than lifetime anchors, and we’re both longtime residents of Los Angeles--we live here, we’re committed to it--we make sure every second we can use is newsy.”

But perhaps because they are both rather low-key compared to some other anchors, and neither is much for self-aggrandizement or promotion, they are essentially the Rodney Dangerfields of the local news scene--less fussed over even than many anchors at independent stations that draw far fewer viewers.

“I don’t know how to explain that except that our being given more responsibility here is out of our hands,” said Dandridge, 50. “That’s up to management. And I think for both Laura and I, we have the attitude that the news isn’t there to bring you us. We’re there to bring you the news. There’s not a lot of ego here. Our job is to do the job and not get into some of that other anchor stuff.”

Both dance around their frustration at not being given a higher profile at KABC, especially since the departures of Martin, Moyer and Dunphy over the past five years pried open anchor chairs that hadn’t been vacated since the 1970s.

“I think we both would love to do more,” said Diaz, who is in her 30s. “And any time management would like to ask us to do that, we would be happy to have more on our plate. . . . I’m sure that most professionals have some frustration over not having control over their work environments, but those decisions are just not in our hands.”

Dandridge says he’s perfectly happy doing what he’s doing, “but it certainly would be crazy to tell you that I wouldn’t like more opportunity, more air time. But all of the shows here, with the exception of [the 11 p.m. newscast], which has been up and down, are doing well. Perhaps we would do something different if it was our decision. It’s a tough question for us. You’ll perhaps have to read between the lines.”

Such decisions, as well as which anchors should be paired together and at which time of day, are based not only on ratings and competence, they said, but also on audience research. “It makes us feel like a box of Tide,” Diaz said.

“Who knows how management decides these things?” Dandridge said. “They do research with focus groups and we get a little bit of feedback, but it really is sort of like a big Ouija board or something.”

Asked for an explanation, KABC news director Cheryl Kunin Fair would not entertain a discussion of the merits of one anchor team versus another. She praised Dandridge and Diaz but added, “I’m happy with all of the people who are anchoring our newscasts.”

Fair said that she preferred presenting a wide variety of anchor styles and personalties over favoring just two or three, so as to give viewers more opportunity to find someone to like and therefore commit to watching the station.

Dandridge and Diaz think the importance of the anchor is overblown, anyway. They say they are simply the highest-paid component of a large and complex team. Writers, editors, producers and helicopter camera operators, all toiling for much less, are equally essential.

“Everyone thinks the anchor is the reason a show is doing well,” Dandridge said. “And the anchor does have influence. The anchor is the face, the personality, the warmth or coldness or whatever the case may be. But there has to be more. It’s never just one or two people that make a successful newscast. You could have the greatest anchor in history, but if you don’t have a good team, it won’t help.”