Rooney Backs News Strike; Won’t Get Paid

“60 Minutes” essayist Andy Rooney, who has pledged not to appear on the program during the current strike of news writers against CBS, won’t be paid as long as he refuses to work, CBS News President Howard Stringer said Monday.

In a prepared statement, Stringer said that the 67-year-old Rooney had been asked to report for work and had refused to do so.

“While we respect Andy’s decision to support the Writers Guild in its strike, we will not continue to pay his salary while he refuses to work,” Stringer said.

Stringer’s action, unusual in that it was so public, was the latest development in the guild’s strike against CBS and ABC. The strike, now in its sixth week, involves 525 members.

Last week, Rooney asked to sit in on the CBS-guild negotiations but was turned down by the network’s representatives, according to a union spokesman.

A CBS News spokeswoman said late Monday afternoon that Rooney’s pay suspension is effective immediately. Rooney has appeared in his brief “60 Minutes” show-closing essays at least once since the beginning of the strike on March 2. However, that segment was taped prior to the walkout.

Although anchorman Dan Rather and other top CBS News names, including “60 Minutes” correspondents Diane Sawyer and Ed Bradley, have made sympathetic statements about the striking writers, Rooney alone has refused to cross picket lines at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street here where CBS News programs originate.

There was no immediate comment from Rooney. Although an avuncular figure on CBS’s top-rated “60 Minutes,” Rooney previously drew notice in 1986 when he publicly criticized the cancellation of the low-rated “CBS Morning News.”

Rooney, whose journalism career goes back to World War II, when he was a war correspondent for the armed services daily newspaper “Stars & Stripes,” has been with “60 Minutes” since 1978.

Related story Part VI, Page 1.