SANDERS LEAVES CBS NEWS

Marlene Sanders, a broadcast journalist for 32 years, wasn’t included in the big layoffs at CBS News. But she was busy packing this week, having decided to leave CBS after it proposed moving her to radio-only work on nights and weekends.

“We agreed to mutually terminate,” Sanders said wryly, adding that a financial settlement had been worked out. In recent months, she had occasionally anchored the short “Newsbreak” broadcasts in prime time on CBS-TV, done stories for the network’s “Sunday Morning” news program and anchored CBS Radio newscasts.

Assigned since 1983 to CBS News’ Northeast Bureau in New York, she joined CBS in 1978 as a member of its “CBS Reports” documentary unit, where she won three Emmy awards.

Before that, she was at ABC News, where she had been a vice president for documentaries, overseeing ABC’s “Closeup” series. During 14 years at ABC, she also worked as a correspondent and producer. Her assignments included a tour in Vietnam in 1966.

Sanders, 56, said she has no new job lined up yet. “I’m off to the great unknown,” she joked. She said she would now concentrate on finishing a book--but not one of the many now being written about the much-publicized troubles and travails of CBS News.

Her work, to be published next year by the University of Illinois Press, is “Television Newswomen: The Life and the Work.”

“I’m not writing a bitter book,” she emphasized. She said it will concentrate on the work and difficulties of women in broadcast journalism, and--she gently laughed--”their view of the future in the business.”

Sanders, who began in TV news when it was a largely male preserve, said she thought she’s had some good years in the business, done good work . . . “I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet” that she’s leaving CBS News.

“I’m trying not to be depressed,” she said. “I don’t want to be a whiner and complainer. These things happen.”

Sanders got her first job in TV news in 1955 at what then was WABT-TV, owned by and part of the ill-fated Dumont television network. She broke in, she said, as a production assistant on a program called “Mike Wallace and the News.”