INSIGHT OF JANKOWSKI KEEPS CBS EYE-CATCHING

Time was when Gene F. Jankowski personified the image of the tight-lipped, severely pinstriped, impeccably unwrinkled New York CBS Inc. executive. They didn’t break the mold when they made Jankowski, he was the mold.

The president of the huge CBS/Broadcast Group--that’s TV, radio, news and just about everything else that most people know as CBS--is still tailored within an inch of his life. But during an interview the other day in the appropriately understated private dining room of Television City, there were hints of creeping mellowness in the 51-year-old son of a Buffalo, N.Y., truck driver.

Jankowski isn’t as uptight as he used be. When Jankowski took the top job at the broadcast group, CBS was an unaccustomed No. 2 in the ratings to ABC and network television seemed destined to die at the hands of cable TV and home video. Eight years later, as CBS appears close to triumphing over Ted Turner’s attempt to buy out the media conglomerate, Jankowski seems finally to have grown comfortable as well as confident entertaining and informing more Americans than anyone else.

“This has been one of the most exciting periods in the history of television. So much has happened,” Jankowski said. “But, today, the business is more difficult and more complex than five years ago or 10 years ago.”

OK, but what was the biggest headache over the years?

“Cable was an obvious one,” Jankowski answered. “People were saying that the networks were dinosaurs and were going to disappear . . . . We never believed that. Inside CBS, we were always positive. Our frustration was not getting people on the outside to listen to us.”

They are listening now. With pay-TV mired, with networks as the principal source of programs videotaped by owners of videocassette recorders and with broadcasting stock prices pushing the outside of Wall Street’s envelope, network TV looks healthier and more robust than it has in years.

“Every generation has its own issues,” Jankowski said. “There’s been no time in our history when there was smooth sailing.”

Despite that minor caveat, Jankowski spoke with a tone of assurance that hasn’t been heard often from network executives in recent years. Although his message that the networks can withstand any new wind of competition is hardly new, it lacked the hollow sound of six years ago when Jankowski gave a speech with a similar theme. Six months later, the corporation launched its ill-fated CBS Cable network, moved aggressively to enter the cable-ownership business and eventually wound up as a partner with Columbia Pictures and Home Box Office in the Tri-Star motion picture studio.

Even as CBS talked tough, its moves in the early ‘80s were obvious hedges against the possibility that the networks wouldn’t survive the decade.

Significantly, during Jankowski’s tenure at the top of CBS’ broadcasting operations, all of the networks have gone through a profound leadership transition, passing from the times when they were still largely run by the men who founded them to an age of corporate managers.

After an especially turbulent decade, the executive turnstiles finally have stopped spinning at NBC, and parent company RCA Corp. ABC founder Leonard H. Goldenson, 79, is preparing to hand over the reins to Capital Cities Communications, and CBS patriarch William S. Paley, 83, has stepped aside as the great helmsman of Black Rock (CBS corporate headquarters in New York).

That transition has pushed men like Jankowski--24 years with the corporation--out of the executive shadows into policy-making positions.

CBS has never actually replaced former President Frank Stanton, who for nearly 40 years played lord high chancellor in Paley’s imperial court. Stanton’s former title has been subsumed by CBS Inc. Chairman and President Thomas H. Wyman, but his role as chief spokesman for all of broadcasting has never been filled.

Consummate CBSer Jankowski would never admit to such lofty ambitions, but he clearly is thinking more these days about the bigger issues of television and communications and less about the daily fluctuations of the Nielsen ratings.

Ask him about CBS without the day-to-day influence of Paley, and Jankowski starts to sound like the keeper of the flame as well as the faith.

“The future is in our hands,” he said. “There are people here who’ve been here and understand the value of the past. The tradition of CBS, to us, is one of our assets. It becomes more valuable to us as things become more competitive . . .

“You know, people say that your batting average goes up when you you put on the pinstripes of the New York Yankees. That’s the way it is here.”

Tradition, image and quiet resolve have long been important at CBS, far more than at either of the other networks. Paley sowed the style and Stanton cultivated it, both insisting that CBS be the Tiffany’s of television even as it stooped, at times, as low as any lowest common denominator of TV.

Much of the tradition was tied up in the news division, which has long had, at once, a more distant and more intimate relationship with corporate management than the news departments of the other two networks. Paley and Stanton took great personal interest in CBS News, and Stanton once successfully defied a congressional subpoena when a House subcommittee investigated a network documentary and threatened him with contempt of Congress. In a floor vote, the full House backed Stanton.

Jankowski seems every bit as devoted to the integrity of CBS as a medium of news and information as either Paley or Stanton. In 1978, Jankowski broke one of the cardinal rules of network management. He appeared on the air to apologize to the public for false representations that CBS Sports had made regarding the payments to participants in alleged “winner-take-all” tennis matches.

In the wake of the damning publicity that CBS received during the libel trial of retired Army Gen. William C. Westmoreland and criticism of the networks’ coverage of the Beirut hostage crisis, Jankowski steadfastly stood by his reporters and news executives.

“The benefit that came out of (Westmoreland) internally was that it made all journalists appreciate the importance of what they have been doing,” Jankowski said. “It’s awesome, just awesome.”

On the issue of alleged network manipulation by terrorists, the man who, in effect, signs Dan Rather’s checks, defended his network and the others in covering an event that, he acknowledges, was fraught with sensitive elements. Criticism of news coverage, Jankowski said, comes with the job, and “news organizations are going to broadcast stories that somebody is not going to like.”

“CBS News has dealt with that problem responsibly,” he said. “Not doing anything wouldn’t be a good step . . . . The outcry would have been 100 times greater if we had blacked anything out.

“I don’t buy the fact that we are easily manipulated. When I first heard that was when the Russians went into Afghanistan and then there was Poland. The Russians never went into Poland the way they went into Afghanistan because they knew the whole world was watching. Then there was the KAL 007 flight, and the Russians held a news conference. The Russians went into the public relations business.

“Societies can no longer operate in a vacuum. They can no longer hide their misdeeds. The world is aware.”