In the land of never-ending liposuction coverage, where a live police pursuit can override the top stories of the day, a television station is showing a spectacle its audience may never have seen: five-minute interviews with candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles.

Since the beginning of March, KNBC has run the interviews between 6 and 6:30 a.m. News directors have expanded the potential exposure for the interviews by posting them on the station's Web site, along with written responses from the candidates to a survey. The online resource is regularly promoted during evening newscasts.

Because voters, in their pursuit for political information online, gravitate toward Web sites run by established news organizations, KNBC's method of using the Internet to overcome time limitations could become a model for television stations in future elections.

At the same time, critics of television news worry that leaning on the Internet could cause stations to shirk their responsibility to cover elections on the air.

'There's no question it's a positive development, especially in a news culture like Los Angeles,' said Paul Taylor, director of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, a nonprofit group in Washington that pushes for television stations to improve their coverage of campaigns.

But the bad news, he said, is that news directors could develop an attitude like this: 'Let's put it up at six in the morning, and put it on our Web site, and get our critics off our back.'

It's surprising that finding time for election coverage could even be an issue in Los Angeles. City politics makes for good coverage by anyone's standards.

This year, the city sits in the midst of a major police corruption scandal, a state power crisis, the potential breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School district and the proposed secession of the San Fernando Valley, a large, prosperous, heavily populated part of the city.

Fifteen candidates are running for an open seat, including the city attorney, the state controller, the former speaker of the state Assembly, a Congressman, a painter, a garment worker and an entrepreneur who owns businesses in the fields of professional wrestling and adult entertainment.

One candidate, Steve Mozena, an electronic textbook publisher, has devoted the better part of his campaign Web site to railing against the lack of coverage local television stations are giving the election.

'The rampant spoilage of our democratic system by the television stations covering Los Angeles has gone unchecked,' the site says. ' . . . This is 'Mediagate', the unfortunate decision to exclude qualified candidates, to render them invisible. What a loss for democracy!'

The site features pictures of Mozena mailing raw chickens to a half-dozen local television news directors, as well as pictures of the candidate sending 'dirt bags' and 'fake poop' to them.

Mozena's opportunity to express his views side by side with all the candidates on KNBC's Web site originated with the station's new president and general manager, Paula Madison, who made it clear to news directors that she was interested in seeing political coverage.

She said she wanted to remove the 'constriction and the ridiculous biases against political coverage. It's an adage in television that political coverage is boring.'

The station's news directors developed the plan for the candidate interviews, and they hope to hold debates before the primary in mid-April.

Madison, who started the job in November, came from a vastly different news culture. At WNBC in New York, where she was vice president and news director, the news team had three political reporters.

'Politics is a passion in New York,' Madison said. 'I think politics could certainly be a passion in California, if we stop dismissing it as a boring topic. In New York, we cover it as a sport.'

When station managers like Madison want election coverage, stations do more election coverage, according to a recent study commissioned by the Alliance for Better Campaigns. The Norman Lear Center Campaign Media Monitoring Project, which conducted the research, measured campaign coverage during evening newscasts at 74 stations last fall during the month leading to the election.

'We found that if they set a policy to do better, they could,' said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center and associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. 'To do that takes leadership from the top.'

In fact, in the 30 days before the election in November, the stations that indicated they would try to improve coverage presented an average of two minutes and 17 seconds of campaign coverage per night during the hours between 5 p.m. and 11:35 p.m. The stations that did not make such a pledge offered an average of 45 seconds of coverage per night.

To get those figures, researchers counted stories that included candidates speaking for 30 percent of the story time. But situations such as anchors reading polls, which constituted 'horse race' coverage and was considered less substantive, did not count in that measurement.

When the researchers factored all political coverage into the mix, including stories about voter registration, mock elections among school children and destruction of political signs, the nightly average among all stations reached 6 minutes and 20 seconds. Researchers, however, considered this figure to be more a measurement of the quantity of campaign coverage than the quality.

These numbers, coupled with a separate study by the Alliance for Better Campaigns, drew a picture of an industry that profits tremendously from political advertising while giving election coverage short shrift.

The Alliance's study, called 'Gouging Democracy,' concluded that local television stations took in at least $771 million from political ads in 2000, which represents a fivefold increase in the amount spent on political advertising since 1980.

Not surprisingly, these studies have been poorly received by the broadcast industry.

'It's our contention that broadcast stations do an excellent job of covering campaigns,' said Dennis Wharton, senior vice president of corporate communications for the National Association of Broadcasters. He criticized the researchers' methods of measuring coverage.

'Here's the problem with somebody like Paul Taylor: What they don't tell you is, it has to be their way or no way,' Wharton said. 'They don't count the Today show or Nightline. They don't even count Sunday talk shows.

'It's Paul Taylor's way or the highway. I think there are a variety of ways to cover campaigns that are not Paul Taylor's way that voters would count as campaign coverage.'

Wharton added that the Federal Communications Commission has not received any complaints about stations overcharging campaigns in recent years.

'The notion that stations are gouging candidates is absolutely false,' he said.

For his part, Taylor said that Wharton's criticism of the methods for counting coverage time was a fair comment, but that gauging so-called 'candidate-centered discourse' is a legitimate measurement of the quality of coverage. Also, he said, hundreds of disputes over advertising prices have reached the FCC. Taylor said that the reason no complaints have been filed is that the commission started handling pricing disputes through mediation in the mid-1990s.

Considering the questions surrounding television coverage of elections, the Internet presents tremendous opportunities for stations to expand campaign coverage as well as to detract from it.

Television news Web sites are well-positioned to become prime resources for campaign information online. The dominance of Web sites connected to television news organzations was clear in a survey conducted last year by the Pew Research Center in association with the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results, released in December, showed that more than half of 1,435 respondents who sought election information online went to the Web sites of national and local news organizations.

Broadcast news outlets, which wielded tremendous advantages because they could promote the sites on the air, outpaced other news Web sites by far. Nearly 60 percent of those who sought election news online went to CNN's site. Fifty-two percent went to MSNBC.com, and 45 percent went to the sites of television networks.

By contrast, only one-third went to the sites of national newspapers, and only 7 percent named online publications such as Slate or Salon.

Michael Cornfield, a political scientist and research director for the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University, said that television stations' Web sites stand to become a principal source for election information online.

He pointed out that with the collapse of most of the profit-seeking political portals, nonprofit organizations that provide election information are the only resources that remain on the Internet.

'The nonprofit isn't going to have the cross-promotion from television,' Cornfield said. For the television stations that use Web sites to expand their coverage, he said, 'this does not satisfy their public-service obligation, but it's a trend worth nurturing.

'People will continue to go to the Internet for political information. They'll be going to the online divisions of the news organizations and political institutions they've known all along.'

While this trend will probably grow, it's not likely that the number of Internet users will approach the scale of television audiences any time soon.

'I'll take anything over nothing,' said Kaplan, the principal investigator on the study of local television coverage of the 2000 elections. 'On the other hand, the very open question is, how many people does it reach?'

Madison at KNBC answered that question only by saying that she wanted to offer a community service that was not driven by numbers.