CBS NEWS’ OUTSPOKEN VOICE

TV news stars, he said flatly, earn too much money.

Broadcast news, he declared, is as much show business as “Dynasty” is.

And the jury is still out, he maintained, on whether the flurry of firings and cutbacks at CBS last spring may have irreparably damaged its once-formidable news division.

Most of those who kept their jobs in the spring bloodbath are too timid to make such bold statements. But not CBS veteran Douglas Edwards, the network’s eminence grise and oldest working correspondent.

“I think we’ll get the acid test when we get the next big story to cover,” the authoritative-voiced anchorman told The Times this week. He cites the recent attempted coup in the Philippines as an instance where CBS News nearly got caught with its pants down.

“We were lucky. We had a stringer in Manila who filed for us until David Jackson could fly up from Hong Kong, but we were a little thin,” he said. The next time there’s a major foreign coup, the airport could be shut down and CBS may not be able to fly a correspondent in, Edwards observed.

It’s then that the tarnish that budget-minded CBS executives have imposed on the “Tiffany” network may really begin to show, he said.

These days, most network news anchors tend to their pancake makeup and their wardrobes and keep such blunt opinions about their employers to themselves. But Edwards is neither timid about criticizing his own network’s penurious ways nor afraid to heap praise on his rivals at ABC.

He counts Ted Koppel among the finest interviewers in television, admires Sam Donaldson’s bulldog tenacity and rates David Brinkley’s “This Week” Sunday show among the best news programs in the nation.

“I don’t mean to bite the hand that feeds me,” apologized the 70-year-old voice of CBS Radio’s “The World Tonight,” who was honored Friday at the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention in Anaheim. Presentation of NAB’s annual Radio Award for lifetime achievement in broadcasting is the highlight of the annual three-day conference, which ends today.

Though he may not mean to bite the CBS hand, Edwards has earned the right to nibble a little. His voice and face have been a staple of CBS since Dec. 1, 1942--and have continued on a regular basis far longer than any of his contemporaries, including Eric Severeid and even Walter Cronkite.

Only the most entrenched couch potatoes will recall who preceded Cronkite in the anchor chair at CBS News. From 1948 until Cronkite took over in 1962, it was Douglas Edwards who pioneered the network television news anchor position for CBS.

“When I left, we had an audience of 30 million. I used to say at the end (of the newscasts), ‘More people get their news from these newscasts than any other source in the world,’ ” Edwards recalled during an interview with The Times.

Though he is still heard booming the news in his stentorian voice each weekday over CBS Radio, Edwards is rarely seen anymore. He handles the midday television newsbreaks on weekdays and hosts a half-hour religious/public affairs program on Sunday mornings, but for the most part his video days are history. Still, he harbors no jealousy of Cronkite, Dan Rather or any of the other instantly recognizable faces of CBS News.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said of his consignment to radio. “New York cab drivers recognize me by my voice and I still have fairly good entree in getting in to see people.

“But there is something about that little screen, though. When I was doing the ‘CBS Morning News’ with Sandy Hill and Charlie Rose (canceled in January in favor of the current “The Morning Program” with Mariette Hartley and Rolland Smith), I got a stack of mail this high,” he said, holding his hands apart as if he were telling a fish tale. “I was contacted by someone who said he was in the second grade with me in Ada, Okla. Strange. It’s hard to argue with the fact that the television picture is a powerful thing.”

It is a powerful moneymaker, too--a fact that hasn’t escaped Edwards. But while he is well compensated under his current five-year contract, his salary is nowhere near the multimillion-dollar wages paid Dan Rather and the “60 Minutes” correspondents.

“Something got loose here a couple of years ago when anchormen could make $2.5 million a year,” he said. “Of course, I suppose they would argue, ‘What good is happiness if you can’t have money?’ I don’t subscribe to that exactly, but I understand the point.”

At the newly streamlined, cost-conscious CBS Inc., Edwards said, the point seems to be to maximize profits. He and Charles Kuralt must share an assistant, he said.

“All future ‘On the Road’ pieces are funneled through her as well as my assignments,” Edwards said. “So when she’s on vacation, the phones just ring off the hook. My feeling is that’s the way they want it, so I guess I can live with it.”

Such is the relatively austere life style nowadays at the network where Edwards began carving out his national reputation as a radio and television personality 45 years ago. But economics weren’t brighter for only the networks then. American affluence filtered down to all industries and the labor force that served them.

In the current U.S. economy, unions such as the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, which is now in the 11th week of a strike against NBC, are making a big mistake, according to Edwards.

“In these days of computers and fixed ideas, there’s got to be a different tool than a strike,” he said. “The whole country is in a paroxysm and unions don’t have the clout they once did.”

Though Edwards sympathizes with broadcast unions and even spoke out publicly in support of the Writers Guild of America during its seven-week walkout against CBS News last spring, he warned that strikes in 1987 are unwise and possibly even suicidal. His unsolicited advice to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which is currently attempting to negotiate a new contract with CBS, is to find some solution short of a strike. The current contract for the IBEW, which represents more than 1,000 of CBS’s technical employees, expires at the end of September.

Edwards’ own CBS contract has 2 1/2 years to run and he expects to continue commuting from his Connecticutt home to Manhattan each day until the contract expires. He’ll be 73 then, and he may finally call it quits.

If he does, he won’t actually retire. He already spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit and there are memoirs to be written, speeches to give. He plans to be busy long after he delivers his final familiar sign-on over CBS Radio:

“This is Douglas Edwards with ‘The World Tonight’. . . .”