‘PERSONAL’ REPRESENTATIVE, NOT STAFF MEMBER : CBS’ LAURENCE TISCH HIRES A PUBLICIST

Beset by bad press and criticism from many of the more than 200 CBS News staffers recently fired as part of a $30-million budget cut, CBS chief executive officer Laurence A. Tisch has hired an outside press agent who served CBS News in an earlier time of woe.

The publicist, John Scanlon, was hired by CBS News to deal with the news media in 1983 after it was sued for $120 million by retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland. The general, who alleged that he had been libeled by a “CBS Reports” documentary about the Vietnam War, subsequently withdrew his lawsuit, ending a court trial that had gone on for more than four months.

Tisch is using Scanlon “as a personal press representative,” a CBS spokesman said. He will not be a CBS staff member.

Scanlon’s hiring comes at a time when the troubled network’s news, entertainment and sports publicity departments are being consolidated into a single unit headed by George Schweitzer, communications vice president for the CBS Broadcast Group.

As part of the reshuffle, Barrie Richardson, 63, a 15-year veteran who is CBS’ New York-based vice president of press information for entertainment shows, is retiring and his job will be eliminated, Schweitzer said Wednesday.

However, there have been no firings in CBS’ 80-member publicity corps, although there are no guarantees that some staffers won’t be laid off, Schweitzer said by telephone from New York. “But the mandate is not to go out and fire people,” he added.

Whether there will be any layoffs will become known in the next few weeks as he and other executives review the CBS press departments and decide if any jobs should be eliminated as part of the consolidation process, Schweitzer said.

On a company-wide basis, more than 1,500 jobs have been trimmed from CBS’ payroll in a streamlining process that began more than a year before Tisch took charge of CBS last Sept. 10, following the ouster of board chairman Thomas H. Wyman.

According to the most recent figures, Schweitzer said, CBS Inc. at the end of last year employed 13,300 persons in the United States and another 7,000 overseas.