Fired by CBS News, Ike Pappas Producing Programs on His Own

In “Broadcast News,” former NBC correspondent Peter Hackes plays a network news chief presiding over a mass layoff very much like the one that actually hit CBS News last year.

In a new movie comedy, “Moon Over Parador,” the man playing a veteran TV correspondent actually is one--thanks to those same CBS cutbacks. He was among more than 200 CBS News staffers pink-slipped as part of a $30-million budget reduction pushed by Laurence A. Tisch, the president of CBS Inc.

Ike Pappas is his name. But acting is not his new game. “Parador” was for kicks. The main event in his post-CBS life is Ike Pappas Network Productions, a news, documentary and video production firm in Washington.

“I’ve probably had the greatest year I’ve had professionally since leaving CBS,” says Pappas, who had spent nearly 23 years at CBS News when the ax fell.

With 15 months left on his contract, Pappas initially had accepted an offer to shift from TV to radio news at CBS. But the offer was pulled back for reasons that never were explained, he said.

He got the news from his immediate boss, Jack Smith, then CBS News’ Washington bureau chief. The moment was equally hard on Smith; the two were old friends. He asked Pappas what he wanted said about his departure to the news media.

The correspondent did not go gentle into that bad day, March 6, 1987. “Tell ‘em that I don’t feel fired--I feel emancipated,” Pappas said.

That became his battle cry as, at age 52, he wrapped up a CBS career that had taken him through presidential election campaigns, conventions, civil rights marches, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Six-Day War, Kent State, the Pentagon and Congress.

Most of the 12 TV correspondents that CBS dropped have since found other news work, among them Michael O’Connor and Bill Redeker, now at KRON-TV in San Francisco and KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles, respectively. Another, former Paris correspondent David Andelman, quit news completely and is a senior vice president of Burson Marsteller, a public relations firm here.

Pappas readily acknowledged that he now is working both sides of the street--producing news on the one hand and video presentations for industry, trade and government clients on the other--with his new company, which set up shop last month.

On the news side, he plans to develop news and documentary programming for independent TV and radio stations--using, in many cases, “a lot of the (CBS News) guys who were laid off. Here’s a natural resource. . . . Just because they’re laid off or let go by CBS does not negate their talents.”

He also is tapping into what he calls the infrastructure of CBS free-lancers around the world. “The ones I know are damn good people,” he says. “And if they’re good enough for CBS, they’re good enough for Ike Pappas Network Productions.”

He is aware that the other side of his company--making videotape programs that promote the various wares of companies, trade associations, governments and other enterprises--poses the potential for conflict of interest.

To avoid that conflict or even the appearance of it, he said, he won’t make such programs if the client intends to have them broadcast.

Nor, he said, would he do issue-oriented programs for clients: “It’s a conflict. I can’t do it, and I wouldn’t do it.”

When the pink slips went out at CBS News last year, most recipients left quietly, having a few or many drinks in the process but keeping their anger or sorrow to themselves and their colleagues.

Pappas, no shrinking violet, proved a notable exception.

Here and in Washington, in the days immediately following the layoffs, he defiantly roared against the new management of CBS and CBS News. His views were amply aired in print and on TV.

That got him “a great many letters” and calls of encouragement from friends around the world and on Capitol Hill, including at least 10 senators and 15 or so representatives, he said.

Then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was among the letter-writers, Pappas said, quoting his latter as saying, “ ‘This is an outrage. If ever you want a job, you’ve got one with me.’ ”

While grateful, Pappas passed. He hit the paid lecture trail, which included an expense-paid trip on a slow boat to China. Then he made his acting debut in “Parador” in the mountains of Brazil in September.

He also began work on a TV documentary about the movement to unify the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. He worked on a pilot for a possible syndicated news series called “Crimewatch Tonight.” (Pappas won’t continue with that project, which he jokingly calls “Lifestyles of the Sick and Famous.”)

These days he is moderately mild in talking about the state of CBS News, although perhaps immoderately pleased that CBS still pays him under an agreement his agent negotiated.

Pappas will draw his full salary and benefits, he said, until May, when he gets $200,000 severance pay; then he can draw an early-retirement pension “which requires them to pay me the rest of my life. So thank you very much, Mr. Tisch.”

Despite his harsh words after he got the chop, they were words of disappointment at what he felt had happened to CBS News, not to him, he said:

“I didn’t feel like, ‘Gee, after all this time, look what they’ve done to me.’ Because as far as I’m concerned . . . I gave to them and they gave to me. They gave me a helluva job a long time ago and I did well with it.

“Nevertheless, they supported my career, gave me 23 years of a life that would be the envy of any reporter in the world. I went and saw things that I never would have seen and done otherwise.

“I was a part of the history of the ‘60s and ‘70, and a good part of the ‘80s. I witnessed the world firsthand. I never thought that any of that was coming to me. I thought CBS put a lot of faith in me over the years.

“And as I looked at it over the long term, I looked at the people who ran CBS News at the time I was laid off as not my people--and that CBS News had fallen into alien hands.”