Two More Pokes in the CBS Eye

By Richard Zoglin

Trench warfare in the executive suites. Longtime employees suddenly thrown into the street. An emotional battle for the very soul of an institution. The biggest headlines at CBS News over the past few years seem to have originated mostly behind the cameras. No company's inside gossip has been the subject of more outside scrutiny than that of CBS, and the result has been a small library of books on the network's inner workings. Few, however, have offered harsher indictments than two new releases that try to affix blame for the turmoil and shifting priorities at TV's most prestigious news division in the 1980s.

The insider glimpses are candid and juicy. CBS Evening News Anchorman Dan Rather is portrayed as an erratic, insecure man, duplicitous in personal dealings. Favored correspondents reportedly are accorded a place on Rather's A list and get frequent exposure on the CBS Evening News. Those who cross him -- Morton Dean, Ed Rabel -- are forced into relative obscurity. But the chief Machiavelli in this troubled kingdom is Van Gordon Sauter, the raffishly flamboyant former president of CBS News, who is charged with virtually dismantling the great journalistic tradition fostered by Edward R. Murrow. Dallas was never so lively.

( Prime Times, Bad Times (Doubleday, $19.95) was written by a key insider from this period: Ed Joyce, who served as Sauter's top deputy, succeeded him as news division president in 1983, and was ousted two years later. Joyce was an unpopular figure, viewed by his staff as an aloof hatchet man who set in motion a painful round of layoffs in 1985. Unsurprisingly, he views himself more sympathetically, as a beleaguered defender of traditional news values. His chief enemy, it seems, was Rather. The anchorman was unfailingly polite and supportive in person, Joyce writes, but campaigned for his ouster behind his back. When the antagonism became clear to Joyce's bosses, there was little doubt about which man was expendable. "There are lots of presidents," CBS Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski told Joyce. "There's only one Dan Rather."

Joyce's otherwise informative memoir is marred by its self-serving tone, and his credibility is damaged by the dubious reconstruction of quotes, many of which make him sound suspiciously articulate. (Talking about Rather to a colleague: "Jesus, he's become like that ornamental vine from Japan, the kudzu, that was introduced in Georgia a few years ago. Now it's spread its tendrils all over the whole damned South . . .") What is more, Joyce rarely steps back from his day-to-day chronology to offer a larger perspective about TV news or even much useful introspection.

Peter Boyer's version of the same period, Who Killed CBS? (Random House, $18.95), is a more balanced and skillfully written account. Boyer, who spent ten months as media critic for the CBS Morning News in 1985, is now TV reporter for the New York Times. One subject on which he is better, oddly, is Ed Joyce. Boyer lucidly describes the missteps that caused Joyce to fall into disfavor with his staff. Soon after becoming news president, for instance, Joyce tried unsuccessfully to move Sandy Socolow, the respected former executive producer of the CBS Evening News, from the London bureau to Tel Aviv. The attempt, which Socolow balked at, "left a bitter taste" with staffers, who saw it as "an effort to squeeze out of CBS News a respected veteran whose principal sin was a close friendship with Walter Cronkite." Joyce, typically, describes the incident in a short paragraph and gives no inkling of its repercussions.

But the role of chief villain in Boyer's book belongs to Sauter, who served two tours as news chief before being forced out of the company in 1986. It was | Sauter, Boyer writes, who coaxed the Evening News away from bland Washington stories and toward an emphasis on heart-tugging TV "moments"; who ruthlessly divided the CBS News staff into "yesterday" people (those identified with the Murrow-Cronkite era) and "today" people (the younger, TV-fluent crowd); who pushed for hiring Phyllis George as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. "Sauter was in charge," writes Boyer, "and it was clear that he wasn't there to validate the glories of CBS News past. He was there to vanquish the past, to repudiate an approach to television that was seen as hidebound and irrelevant and the philosophies of broadcast journalism that fostered that approach. That was his mission, and that is what he did."

But Boyer oversimplifies. Many of the changes at CBS News would have occurred with or without Sauter; nor have all of them been bad. (They have certainly not been unique to CBS.) Boyer is on the shakiest ground in his final chapter, in which he tries to fit the events of the past year -- when CBS News' fortunes have improved -- into his anti-Sauter thesis. His assertion that Rather's newscast has degenerated into a "broad-reaching video tabloid" seems particularly unfounded.

In the end, both books leave an outsider bemused. To be sure, CBS News has gone through troubled times, and the questions raised here are serious ones for all of TV journalism. But much of this inside stuff is little more than the predictable sturm und drang of corporate politicking. Couldn't the conflict between yesterday people and today people, for example, be explained less ominously as the normal tendency of new management to favor its own people over the previous regime's? Aren't clashes like the one between Rather and Joyce common to any large organization employing strong-willed creative people? And if these people were not on TV, would anybody -- anybody outside of CBS, that is -- really care?