CBS DENIES SEEKING $50-MILLION CUT IN NEWS DIVISION

In an unusual move prompted by queries from its affiliated stations, CBS, which has undergone heavy cost-cutting in the last 20 months, notified them Friday that CBS News “has not been asked to take a $50-million budget cut.”

The notification by Gene F. Jankowski, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, came in the wake of what he called “some confusing press reports” that said CBS board Chairman Lawrence A. Tisch had asked CBS News to cut its $300-million budget for this year by that amount.

Neither Tisch, Jankowski nor CBS News President Howard Stringer was available at press time for comment, although Tisch earlier was quoted by the Dow-Jones News Service as calling the idea of a $50-million cut “ludicrous.”

George Schweitzer, a broadcast group spokesman, said that Stringer has been studying new ways of gathering news as part of a continuing effort to reduce costs in his 1,200-employee division, which already has eliminated 214 jobs.

But “no targets have been set” regarding cuts in the CBS News budget, Schweitzer said, emphasizing that this cost-study process also is under way in all CBS divisions.

Schweitzer wouldn’t rule out the prospects of more budget-trimming, saying that “it is no secret to anyone at CBS that we are continuing to look at ways to relieve the cost pressure on entertainment, sports and news. This is consistent with everything we’ve been saying here for the past eight months.”

The CBS News budget, as with that of every division at the company, was approved in December, but Schweitzer emphasized that budgets only “are plans. They’re not cast in stone. Budgets respond to the marketplace.”

The cost-cutting and layoffs at all three networks have been attributed to what the networks say are lean times in the advertising market.

There has been speculation that were a $50-million chunk taken from the CBS News budget, it could lead to a radical change in the way the news is gathered for the “CBS Evening News” and other CBS News programs.

According to this speculation, some of the division’s 15 domestic and 10 foreign news bureaus could be reduced in staff or closed altogether, and highly paid correspondents might be replaced by producer-reporters who would file stories to New York for editing and voice-over narration by anchorman Dan Rather or several other well-known correspondents.

One former CBS executive now at a rival network said that approach would take CBS News back to “neo-newsreel days.”

However, other CBS News sources said they seriously doubted that such a drastic change would occur.

Changing the way the division’s troops gather the news “is something that’s been talked about for some time,” one source said. “But I doubt they could ever get to the point where you had just Dan Rather and four other guys reading the main stuff night after night.”

However, he said, “It’s Mr. Tisch’s candy store. He can take it any way he wants to. It’s that old business of trying to figure out where the middle ground lies.”

The source, interviewed prior to Jankowski’s denial that CBS News had been asked to take a $50-million budget cut, said he hadn’t heard that figure bandied about before, although there had been rumors of a $20-million cut.