NBC and KRON Are Jittery Over Quake Coverage : Television: NBC and its San Francisco TV affiliate had their own minor temblor over the fissure in quake coverage.

While NBC and its San Francisco affiliate, KRON-TV, squabbled Monday over who was to blame for last week’s belated network quake coverage, many of NBC’s other stations were demanding action to prevent another 6.9 breakdown in their network news feeds.

“You can almost let your imagination run loose on what a general manager might say when he has been this badly beaten,” said James Sefert, chairman of the NBC Affiliates Board.

Sefert said he returned from vacation Monday to find “a stack of letters two inches thick” from general managers of many of NBC’s 208 affiliates.

He also found a scathing 6-page letter that KRON’s owners sent Friday to Sefert and several NBC executives, in essence saying the network had given it a bum rap in attributing its late coverage of the disaster to a power outage at KRON.

The San Francisco TV station acknowledged that it was knocked off the air following the Oct. 17 temblor, but said that it was down for only 28 minutes. NBC, however, did not choose to go to continuous coverage using KRON’s video feeds until nearly two hours after the killer quake struck at 5:04 p.m.

According to Francis A. Martin III, president of Chronicle Broadcasting Co., which owns KRON-TV, the station was off the air from 5:07 p.m. to 5:35 p.m. because it had no emergency backup power source. But by 5:48 p.m., he wrote, the NBC affiliate in Sacramento, KCRA, was picking up KRON’s transmission off a Stockton cable TV system and relaying the signal, via satellite, to KNBC-TV Channel 4 in Los Angeles.

Two minutes later, at 5:50 p.m., CNN also began picking up the KRON signal and sending it to its affiliates, he wrote.

If NBC News executives in New York had so chosen, Martin charged, they could have used the relayed KRON signal at that point and still beaten CBS by five minutes. Martin said CBS News did not interrupt regular programming with Dan Rather’s continuous network coverage until 5:55 p.m.

For still unexplained reasons, however, NBC’s Tom Brokaw did not take to the air continuously until 6:43 p.m., according to NBC spokeswoman Peggy Hubble. The network did interrupt its regular programming with quake updates about a half-dozen times before Brokaw began anchoring what turned out to be all-night coverage of the Bay Area disaster.

Last week, NBC News executives had put the blame solely on KRON’s shoulders. On Monday, however, spokeswoman Peggy Hubble said, “I can’t respond point-by-point to (the KRON) letter, even if I wanted to. We have to look at our internal procedures, and there are still some missing links in all of this.”

KRON general manager Amy McCombs pointed to a New York Daily News story published Monday for one of those links. According to the story, an “inexperienced desk assistant” at the New York headquarters of NBC News was believed responsible for turning down the initial offer of KRON quake feeds. The desk assistant has since been reassigned, according to the Daily News.

Hubble refused comment on the newspaper’s reports. She would not say whether anyone had been reassigned but did say no one has been fired over the incident.

“We’re all unhappy that we were not on sooner, and we all acknowledge that we were late out of the gate,” she said. “Once we did get going, I think we had good coverage, and I think the affiliates were happy we stayed on through the night.”

McCombs said she assembled her staff late last week to piece together the chronology of events from KRON’s point of view and mail it off to Sefert quickly in order to counter the criticism leveled at the station from the network. Despite the pressure on her news staff to cover the aftermath of the quake, they worked to get the letter out “because we wanted to get it done while it was still fresh in everyone’s minds,” she said.

NBC affiliates chairman Sefert, who also is president of Cosmos Broadcasting in Greenville, S.C., said mistakes appeared to have been made by both the network and KRON and that there would be many meetings and conference calls in the coming weeks to try to head off a similar situation in the future.