East Coast State of Mind Rules TV News

Since Sept. 11, a TV media world already East Coast-centric seems to be paying even less attention to the time divides that carve the country into four regions. Tune into a 24-hour news channel and there’s usually an anchor offering up some version of this: “Here are the latest developments as we hit noon” or 2 or 5 or 8 ... “here on the East Coast.”

TV news will forever be a business driven by time, in which the ability to take viewers to the scene as it is happening separates the winners from the losers. So it’s not surprising that newscasters make a habit of noting what time an event is unfolding, or a news conference is being held--underscoring the immediacy of the report. Still it can feel that the entire world of news operates on East Coast time. West Coast viewers, and those in the Central and Mountain time zones, are left to “do the math” on their own.

Even before September, data from ratings service Nielsen Media Research show that West Coast viewers watched the all-news channels less than their Eastern counterparts, giving rise to a “chicken-and-egg” debate that news executives have yet to settle: Do people watch less news on the West Coast because they have less interest in world events, or because news operations pay relatively little attention to happenings within their time zone?

Understandably, in the aftermath of the terror attacks virtually all the attention of broadcast news organizations has been focused on New York, Washington and Afghanistan. While Atlanta-based CNN and New York-based MSNBC and Fox News Channel aspire to be news channels for the country, their recent on-air look is almost all East Coast, when it’s not Afghanistan.

New, high-profile CNN anchors such as Aaron Brown and Paula Zahn are based in New York, which is facing a massive recovery from the terror attacks, not CNN’s Southern headquarters. And with resources concentrated on war coverage, CNN, for one, has put off indefinitely a plan to launch a Los Angeles-based morning show.

Of the growing perception of a chasm between the coasts in terms of coverage, news channel executives say they are aware of the divide but not quite sure what to do about it. “I totally get it and am sympathetic to it because I lived in California for so long,” says Jamie Kellner, who moved from Santa Barbara to Atlanta earlier this year when he took over running AOL Time Warner’s basic cable channels, including CNN. “It may seem to be more New York-centric than ever before, but ground zero is the biggest story of our time.”

Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, based just over the Hudson River from New York in Secaucus, N.J., finds the reaction from viewers is as much about their state of mind as it is about coverage. From the Easterners, he says, it is: “Don’t they understand that we’re in World War III, that we’ve been attacked, that they could be next?” From Westerners he gets this: “What’s wrong with them, they’re obsessed, paranoid, overwrought, they need a break.” But does it matter? Some argue the consequences of an overlooked West Coast are severe. “L.A. is always ignored or, when it’s convenient, it’s dissed,” says Joel Kotkin, Los Angeles-based author of “The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape.” The result, he says: “It accentuates the phlegmatic nature of the town, the disassociation of people from their community, the indifference or torpor of its elites.” It can have an effect on capital markets, he says, noting that the relative strength of Los Angeles’ economy has been almost totally overlooked.

But given the gruesome nature of the story that most recently has put New York front and center, Los Angeles should “count its blessings,” says William A. McClung, author of “Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles.” He believes the current news focus is “unavoidable” and notes that there’s even a “relative neglect” of the plane crash at the Pentagon, which rarely gets mentioned. New York, he says, “epitomizes the American city, Manhattan epitomizes New York, skyscrapers epitomize Manhattan, and the [World Trade Center] towers epitomize skyscrapers. Thus we have an Eastern grounding all the way down to ground zero.”

And TV news, he adds, “thrives on that encapsulating.”

The current population distribution also helps explain the East Coast focus. Nielsen’s breakdown shows that of a total pool of 270 million people 2 and older with television in the U.S., 130 million (48%) are in the Eastern time zone, 78 million (29%) are in the Central time zone, while the Mountain and Pacific time zones combined have 62 million people (23%).

With few exceptions, most national radio and TV stations have been East Coast-based, an outgrowth of broadcast networks’ hometowns and the overriding attention on Washington news that dominated national news coverage well into the 1980s.

Media consolidation in the last decade has only increased the concentration of headquarters in New York. In the 1980s, cable’s Financial News Network originated much of its programming from Los Angeles, but that ended when it merged with New York suburb-based CNBC; New York-based Time Warner acquired CNN in 1996 (and itself was acquired by AOL this year). Today, Public Radio International’s “Marketplace” business program, which is produced in Los Angeles, prides itself as being “the only daily national news program originating from the West Coast.”

Media operations rarely spend the extra money to have shows originate from outside their Eastern studios. National Public Radio is working on an expanded Los Angeles production facility, but CNN in February slashed its West Coast production unit as the new media revolution sputtered. L.A.-based entertainment shows, such as Fox News Channel’s weekend “Entertainment Coast to Coast,” have been preempted for war coverage, and though CNN talk host Larry King is based in Los Angeles, he frequently broadcasts from New York and Washington.

That geographical base translates on the air. Nameless, faceless “media,” Kotkin says, “are actually people; they live somewhere and they’ve made life choices and very often lifestyle choices that affect how they look at the world.” That so many of them are now New Yorkers, he says, can’t help but have an effect. West Coast viewers also have to adjust to East Coast scheduling on news from the broadcast networks. The networks generally update their tape-delayed morning and evening newscasts when the news warrants, which in recent months has been several times a week. But when they don’t, viewers on the West Coast see news that was taped three hours earlier. One exception is ABC’s “World News Tonight,” which airs at 4:30 p.m. on “Monday Night Football” days.

Cable has a unique problem, however, because to save money, most networks choose to have just one signal that airs simultaneously across the country. It’s standard practice for many anchors to give viewers East Coast time, so when CNN’s Brown says it’s noon, it isn’t for more than half of the country. If MSNBC’s Sorenson had his way, the cable news network anchors wouldn’t announce the time at all. “I think people know what time it is wherever they are,” he says. “It drives me crazy.”

There are some advantages to the time disparity, says Kellner. On the West Coast, he could catch CNN’s Larry King at 6 p.m, a definite plus “because I generally was out” by the time the 9 p.m. prime-time replay rolled around.

Sorenson, a former news director at KCBS-TV, says his biggest complaint when he lived in Los Angeles was the taped programming that cable viewers get in some prime hours. Indeed, by 11 p.m. CNN has moved into airing programming from its London-based international network.

Since Sept. 11, however, West Coast viewers of MSNBC have been getting a live newscast at 8 p.m., says Sorenson, something the broadcast networks can’t do.

He says it will continue indefinitely. “The world is going to be serious enough for long enough that there will be support for that program,” he says.

Beefing up coverage for the West Coast is a tough call when cable news organizations look strictly at the numbers.

In March, to cite an extreme example, 61% of MSNBC’s viewers came from the Eastern time zone and just 16% from the Mountain and Pacific time zones. More recently, in September, 55% of MSNBC’s total viewers each day on average came from the Eastern time zone, compared with 20% from Mountain and Pacific; for CNN, 51% of its audience was in the Eastern time zone and 21% in Mountain and Pacific. Fox News Channel in September hewed more closely to the population breakdown, with 48% of its viewers in the Eastern time zone and 23% in Mountain and Pacific. All the figures were based on Nielsen data as analyzed by the MSNBC research department.

Whatever the reason--whether it’s the lack of coverage of local issues or the culture of the coast, “people on the West Coast seem not to be as interested in news as people back East,” says Sorenson.

As sheepish as news executives are about the stereotype, there may be some truth to it, says Kotkin. “L.A. is a backyard society, and the focus is on life that isn’t the life of the city.”

For many who moved to Los Angeles, “no matter how ambitious they were, or how hard they intended to work, a part of their mind was focused on the idea of how to escape the hard realities of Eastern life,” says McClung. “It’s part of the cultural mythology of the place.” Network news executives have toyed with being more mindful of their West Coast viewers. Before Sept. 11, CNN was working on a program meant to draw West Coast viewers away from “Today” and “Good Morning America” by airing in the morning hours in the Pacific time zone and midday on the East Coast. The show would have been hosted by Willow Bay, a CNN anchor based in Los Angeles because her husband, Walt Disney Co. President Robert Iger, lives there.

But the show went on the back burner after Sept. 11.

“So many additional resources are going to covering the war that to add other elements is just not practical,” says Kellner, adding that CNN will “definitely come back to it.”