CBS, ASSOCIATED PRESS DENY MERGER REPORT

Top executives of CBS and the Associated Press denied Wednesday a published report that the two organizations are discussing a news-sharing arrangement that “would fall just short of a merger between the two companies.”

“It’s nonsense,” said AP President Louis D. Boccardi, while Van Gordon Sauter, an executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group, said a Wednesday report in Daily Variety, a leading show-business publication, was wrong.

Boccardi said no merger has been discussed and that AP’s by-laws would bar a merger anyway. The wire service, a news cooperative, says it serves 1,300 newspapers and 3,000 broadcasters domestically, and 10,000 newspapers and broadcasters overseas.

The news divisions of ABC, NBC and Cable News Network, as well as CBS, are among the members of AP in the United States.

The Variety report said that CBS News, under pressure from its parent corporation to hold down costs, had been discussing plans with AP to place a reporter and camera crew in every AP bureau around the world.

Boccardi denied that. He said that CBS had raised with AP the possibility of setting up a joint venture overseas with AP in which news stringers would shoot foreign news footage, which then would be sold to customers of the operation.

Such a venture would be a totally separate operation, he said, with no AP news staff members involved. It would be similar to foreign news-film organizations, such as Visnews or World Television News, whose primary American customers are NBC and ABC, respectively.

There’s no talk by AP and CBS of starting such an operation in the United States, Boccardi emphasized. He also said the organizations’ discussions about a jointly owned foreign news-film subsidiary are only preliminary, and may not result in anything definite.

Sauter said that CBS’ proposal to AP was first made about a year ago and has been under discussion by lower-level executives of the two organizations. Approval of any joint venture--when and if a plan for one ever is drawn up--would rest with AP’s board of directors.