DiCaprio and ‘Planet Earth’ Rank Fourth in Time Slot

Leonado DiCaprio’s star power was not enough to get audiences to tune in to “Planet Earth 2000,” the ABC special that included DiCaprio’s interview with President Clinton on environmental issues and has drawn much ire from within ABC’s news ranks in recent weeks.

Though segments featuring the popular actor, who is also chairman of Earth Day 2000, were laced throughout the hourlong show, which aired Saturday at 8 p.m., it ranked fourth among the networks during the time slot.

Among adults 18 to 49, overnight ratings data from Nielsen Media Research put ABC, with a 3.6 rating/7 share, behind the CBS drama “Early Edition,” a repeat of “The Pretender” on NBC and back-to-back episodes of “Cops” on Fox. Estimates of the average audience for the show were not available Sunday.

While it was DiCaprio’s interview with Clinton that had drawn such heat, the special liberally featured the actor from the opening moments, with DiCaprio perched on rocks in the riverbed of the Los Angeles River just blocks from where he grew up, to his final thoughts in the butterfly conservatory of the American Museum of Natural History, to his just-under-three-minute tour of the White House and conversation with President Clinton.

The ABC Earth Day special ran into trouble from the minute that DiCaprio taped his interview with the president on March 31. Several of ABC’s top journalists objected to the plum assignment being ceded to an actor. And while DiCaprio began his interview with the president by saying “As you know, I am neither a politician or a journalist . . . but a concerned citizen,” that is likely to do little to defuse the internal dissension.

ABC executives compounded the problem when, trying to calm the troops, they insisted that it was the White House that had turned a “walk-through” to look at the building’s energy-saving features into a formal interview.

When ABC refused to back down from that scenario, which the White House denied, the president got even at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Assn. dinner, where Clinton quipped, “Don’t you news people ever learn? It isn’t the mistake that kills you, it’s the cover-up.”

The two sides continued to differ publicly over whether the interview lasted 15 minutes (ABC’s version) or a half-hour.