Columnist Dean Juipe: Channel 3 gets radical, ousts sports

Dean Juipe

Monday, May 3, 1999 | 10:38 a.m.

Dean Juipe is a Las Vegas Sun sportswriter. His next column will appear on Wednesday. Reach him at 259-4084 or juipe@lasvegassun.com.

It always seemed like the weather, if anything, would be the first to go and the least missed.

If something had to be dropped from a TV newscast, axing the weather segment was thought to be at the top of the list. Many stations have reduced the minutes they allot for weather, and some have even given the responsibility of reciting the day's particulars to an anchor who could squeeze it into a minute or so at the tail end of the newscast.

But no one, prior to KVBC Channel 3 in Las Vegas, ever saw the benefit of dropping sports from its 30-minute evening and late-night showcases. Sports has always been a staple of a TV newscast, no matter the market or the passion of its sports fans.

By August, however, Channel 3 will go without a regular, scheduled sportscast. That perplexing decision was made last week, although it appears as if the station's management team is reluctant to step forward and attempt to justify its zany decision.

No sports?

The station feels the city's sports fans are getting their information -- their scores and basic news of the day -- from other sources, specifically cable networks that specialize in sports. The feeling is that the person who wants to know what's happening in sports already knows it, or has access to it, and that the six o'clock and 11 o'clock time periods can be better utilized.

On the surface, that seems absurd. And it will seem even more absurd unless Channel 3 replaces sports with a steady flow of scintillating news features, something it certainly hasn't shown any signs of mastering just yet.

KVBC will become the country's largest television station without a sportscast and, in spite of its beliefs to the contrary, it's safe to say this is not the wave of the future. If anything, KVBC's decision will tempt the city's other stations to beef up their sportscasts and capitalize on the fact a rival has intentionally severed an artery.

A prediction: KVBC will someday reconsider, perhaps after the inevitable housecleaning of its sports department.

Sports director Andrew Smith is under contract until February and he says he'll stay and do the occasional sports feature that KVBC will run even after it drops sports this summer. Weekend anchor Brian Lippai's contract expires in August and the station will bid him adieu and drop its sportscast as soon as he clears out his locker.

Lippai has taken a few hits in the print media and rightfully so. If he utilized his time slot better, maybe his station wouldn't be letting him go and turning its back on sports. For instance, two Saturdays ago Lippai ran a horrid feature in which he played tennis against a singer who's appearing at a local casino, and then used the chitchat time to lobby the singer for a comp ticket to a performance. And this past Saturday he re-ran a puffy feature on the Las Vegas Stars at 6 p.m. rather than use that valuable time to talk about the wide range of sports activities that had transpired during the day.

Those are not examples of time well spent, and the underlying message may be that all of us in the media have to use our time and space wisely. For the TV sports guys, it means digging in and encapsulating what needs to be encapsulated and knocking off the drivel.

People want sports at 6 and 11, and they'll settle for it being concise. But they also want it without the biases and self-serving characteristics that have tainted this market for many years.