Rather, Jennings March in News Writers’ Picket Lines

Anchormen Dan Rather of CBS and Peter Jennings of ABC briefly joined picketing news writers on Monday as the strike by 525 news writers, editors, graphics artists, promotion writers and other off-air personnel at the two networks entered its second week.

The weekend negotiations between management and the Writers Guild of America failed to produce a settlement, and federally mediated talks were to resume today.

Rather, on the sixth anniversary of his debut as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” said he joined the pickets as a show of concern for his fellow employees. In shirt-sleeves, he came out of the CBS Broadcast Center at noon and walked for 10 minutes with a peaceful line of pickets, whose ranks were quickly swelled by other top-name CBS News correspondents, including Charles Osgood, Diane Sawyer, Ed Bradley and Ike Pappas, the 19-year CBS News veteran who Friday became one of 14 correspondents to be let go in the latest CBS retrenchment.

“We’re still correspondents. They just took the CBS away,” Pappas said, according to those present.

“I am sad about what’s happening,” Rather said, referring to the fact that CBS News has laid off more than 400 employees since 1985.

ABC anchor Jennings briefly joined a smaller demonstration outside that network’s studios.

Rather, who reportedly earns about $2 million annually, initially sidestepped questions about a call by former CBS News President Fred Friendly that high-paid anchors and correspondents voluntarily take pay cuts by a third to help avoid drastic budget cuts at their networks.

But when pressed, Rather said he is open to the proposal, although he did not specifically endorse Friendly’s suggestion of a one-third cut.

“I’m willing to do it. Have been for a long time. I’m prepared to do it,” he said.

As Rather spoke, the head of CBS Inc. tried to clarify who ordered the more than 200 layoffs in a $30-million budget cut that has embittered so many at CBS News.

CBS Chief Executive Laurence A. Tisch met for five hours with CBS News President Howard Stringer and then issued a memo to the News Division in which Tisch--whom some say ordered the budget cut and the layoffs--seemed to accept the responsibility for the reductions.

His memo said he accepted the retrenchment recommendations of Stringer’s staff, but it left unclear whether Tisch in fact had mandated the cuts, which became official Thursday.

Stringer had told his staff that Tisch had asked for budget and staff reductions. Both men were unavailable for comment Monday.

But Tisch, in a New York Times interview published Monday, said that Stringer, not he, had ordered the cuts. The report, a CBS source said, put Stringer “in an intolerable position with his staff in terms of credibility. . . .”

Tisch, in his memo, said that CBS News management accepted a “painful and difficult assignment” of readying cutbacks and streamlining and “carried it out superbly under Howard Stringer’s leadership, and I accepted wholeheartedly their recommendations of an approximate 10% reduction” in the division’s budget.

“It was not an assignment that anyone relished or that I enjoyed giving them,” he said.

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