New Face on the Tube

With the stunning suddenness of a TV-show cancellation, the management of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., last week reached over the heads of at least two front-running executives to choose a president from outside. The new man is Charles T. Ireland Jr., 50, a Yale-trained lawyer and a senior vice president of ITT, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Ireland will rank third at CBS, after Chairman William S. Paley and Frank Stanton, who shifts from president to vice chairman. Stanton will retire in 1973, when Ireland will presumably move up to No. 2.

Why did CBS bring in an outsider? The company has become something of a conglomerate itself--toys, books, guitars--with only 55% of its $1.2 billion revenues last year coming from broadcasting. Ireland's four years at ITT will thus be useful. Moreover, a slump at CBS--first-half earnings were down from $28.7 million to $22.5 million--calls for financial rather than entertainment expertise.

Ireland was a longtime associate of the late financier Robert R. Young. He was president of Young's Alleghany Corp., the holding company that controlled the New York Central Railroad and still controls Investors Diversified Services. In 1967 he moved to ITT as special assistant to Chairman Harold Geneen, but ITT insiders say that he did not cotton to Geneen's authoritarian ways and had been looking around for some time.

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