In the Eye of the Storm : CBS News Turmoil Reported From Two Perspectives

No longer the most-watched network, CBS remains the most written about. If only it could convert the slew of books about it into ratings points.

The long list swells with the addition of Peter J. Boyer’s “Who Killed CBS?” and “Prime Times, Bad Times” by former CBS News President Ed Joyce. Still more CBS books are on the horizon. And then what, kiss and tell from the CBS mail room?

The prevailing book-jacket strategy seems to be that a volume advertising a mere news division is less salable than one about an entire network. Hence, the misleading title of Boyer’s book, whose main focus, like Joyce’s, is not the corporate sprawl of the CBS network, but the instability of CBS News in the post-Cronkite 1980s.

Once a gleam in the CBS eye, the news division spent the early-to-middle part of the decade blackened by uncertainty, internal dissension, external threats, mismanagement, and crippling budget cuts and layoffs that drove down morale and imperiled the golden legacy of “the house that Murrow built.”

Boyer’s book says that Joyce contributed mightily to the instability.

Joyce’s book says that he didn’t. Joyce quotes himself as telling a colleague when his days heading the division were numbered: “I’m being positioned as the one who is doing terrible things to CBS News when I think I’ve often been the only one who cared about that place.”

Many acquainted with Joyce’s record will choke reading that.

“Ed Joyce is a miserable human being,” said Miami-based CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, whom Joyce labels “the ego that ate Miami.” Incredibly, Joyce devotes almost five pages to ridiculing Goldberg’s 1985 contract demands, including a transfer to Miami so that he could be closer to his son. “Joyce was a mouse in training to be a rat,” Goldberg said from New York, where he was working on the CBS News series “48 Hours.”

The Joyce and Boyer books are good reads. Joyce’s is more gossipy, overflowing with the remarkably verbatim and sometimes juicy recollections of a key insider, but also a colorless bureaucrat who was fired and blames almost everyone but himself for the news division’s

failings. This is kiss and hiss.

Boyer, who covers television for the New York Times, as he once did for the Los Angeles Times before a brief stint as media analyst on “The CBS Morning News,” is more interpretive and better positioned to write objectively. Unlike Joyce, he has no ax to grind or reputation to salvage.

These are serious books, but ones that include such hilarious (to an outsider, at least) interludes as the miscasting of Phyllis George as the savior of “The CBS Morning News.” As Joyce tells it, George ultimately wanted to do hard-news interviews as co-host and requested “that Gandhi woman” for a start. Informed that Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was unavailable because she was dead, George reportedly responded: “Oh . . . well, somebody like her.”

Joyce and Boyer unfold essentially the same odyssey of CBS News from different perspectives, sharing a turbulent corporate arena and a cast of characters ranging from Dan Rather to the truly amazing and controversial Van Gordon Sauter, that shrewd image master whose two stormy reigns as CBS News president sandwiched Joyce’s.

When it comes to Sauter and Joyce, seldom have so few men made so many enemies.

Super agent Richard Liebner, who wielded enormous influence at CBS News through his wealth of clients there, joins Rather and Sauter as Joyce’s biggest targets.

Joyce depicts Rather, who apparently had much to do with getting Joyce fired, as deeply insecure, unstable and unpredictable.

There’s more than a trickle of evidence to back up Joyce, ranging from Rather’s baffling weeklong sign-off with the word “courage” to his 6-minute walkout to protest coverage of a late-running tennis match that spilled over into “The CBS Evening News.”

As for Sauter, Joyce’s former close friend, soul brother and ally, whom he strongly implies ultimately betrayed him, Joyce delivers praise booby-trapped with reproachful slams. Yes, says Joyce, he really cared for this big lug of a “bearded chameleon who could be Falstaff one moment and Iago the next.” No wonder Joyce was sometimes known as the “velvet shiv.”

It is Sauter in this account who invariably disappoints and abandons Joyce at critical times, always seeming to be looking the other way or dreamily puffing his pipe while Joyce boldly argues for quality journalism with their bosses at the corporate headquarters known as Black Rock.

The Joyce and Boyer books obliquely raise questions about the role and future of once-dominant network news divisions in a broadcasting era of fiscal austerity, TV diversity and booming satellite technology that increases newsgathering options for local stations.

Even more fundamental, both books reflect the crucial difference between most newspapers and TV news programs--a comparison that goes beyond print versus pictures.

The main business of newspapers is usually news.

The main business of television is entertainment.

TV news programs are but one sliver of a medium whose purpose is mostly amusement and diversion. The result--demonstrated so acutely in private dialogues chronicled by Joyce and Boyer--is a constant clash of goals, values and philosophies, a continuing struggle between the newsers and entertainers for influence, budget and air-time.

The outcome is usually inevitable. Both Joyce and Boyer relate, for example, the attempt in 1981 by then CBS News President Bill Leonard to convince network affiliates to endorse a much-needed doubling of the “The CBS Evening News” to an hour. That would have required them to relinquish a half-hour of local time that was yielding enormous profits from syndicated programs.

Naturally, they refused.

CBS News traditionally had been Black Rock’s pet, its reputation as the nation’s finest broadcast news organization through the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s infusing CBS founder William S. Paley and the entire network with pride. Yet “the relationship of news to the company was at once antagonistic and dependent, pampered and perilous,” Boyer writes in a passage from the perspective of Leonard’s predecessor, Richard Salant. “It was a contradiction, an enigma, a quirk. CBS wasn’t in the news business, Salant knew; it was in the broadcasting business.”

So it was a broadcasting decision--not a news decision--that Gene Jankowski, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, made in 1981 in passing over the obvious choices and picking relative outsider Sauter as news division president and Joyce as his deputy, charging them to lead “The CBS Evening News” back to dominance with Rather as anchor. There were better and more traditional journalists available than Sauter. But traditional journalism didn’t win ratings, Boyer writes--”Effective television won ratings.”

Coming from a long background in local TV, including a stint heading KNXT (now KCBS) in Los Angeles before briefly heading CBS Sports, Sauter did not want CBS news programs catering to “pointy-heads,” reports Joyce, who succeeded Sauter at Channel 2 here.

Indeed, after his appointment by Jankowski, Sauter told a Los Angeles Times reporter that his plans for shaping up the news division’s current morning program included cutting loose the program’s “beards.” Sauter meant highly valued media critic Ron Powers and thoughtful sports reporter Ray Gandolf, who were bearded and too stuffy to charm viewers over morning coffee, Sauter felt. The irony was that Sauter himself was a Hemingway-esque figure who wore a full beard.

Boyer also recalls the “doctrine of moments” that Sauter introduced to CBS News. Sauter wanted each evening newscast to include “moments”--stories that reached out and touched, stories that people could feel and smell, stories that tapped emotions and impulses. That, writes Boyer, “was a deftly designed cover for the infiltration of entertainment values into the news.” Even more, it redefined news in visceral terms.

Most of the old guard of CBS News could be expected to resist the Sauter changes. So, according to Boyer, Sauter and Joyce divided CBS News into two groups: “Yesterday” people would be isolated or ignored; “today” people would be the news division’s future.

The disenchanted included Bill Moyers, the commentator and documentary maker extraordinaire, who viewed Sauter as an enemy of serious news reporting. “There are a number of us who have said to one another Ed Joyce would put quality journalism on the air if he had a free hand, but he doesn’t have it,” Joyce quotes Moyers as saying.

Sauter and Joyce both “had the wrong stuff,” in the view of Goldberg, the 16-year CBS News veteran who found Sauter “a nice guy you liked to hang out with.”

“Television news was changing, they were trying to evolve that, and a lot of guys looked upon that as good,” Goldberg said. “But Sauter and Joyce were fundamentally different from those who preceded them.”

The “Bobbsey Twins,” as Goldberg calls them, trampled CBS News tradition. “For them, history began the day they took over. There was nothing before them. As one very prominent Washington correspondent put it to me once: ‘They’d burn down the Washington bureau if they could get away with it.’ ”

Sauter and Joyce had breakfast and lunch together and constantly hung out with one another and, despite Joyce’s attempt to picture himself as independent-spirited, he became “a kind of miniature Van Sauter,” writes Boyer. George Bush and Ronald Reagan come to mind when Boyer describes Joyce as being “utterly emulative” of Sauter and carrying out “his role as a subordinate to the extreme,” including buying a black Jeep like the one Sauter used to drive, and buying Sauter’s old house and keeping its telephone number.

There is one thing that Joyce couldn’t emulate, however, and that was Sauter’s mastery of the press who covered TV. Sauter was an epic manipulator and charmer who played reporters like a harp, becoming his own “moment” by imparting to them the same kind of visceral experiences he imparted to viewers of “The CBS Evening News.” Tweedy and bow-tied, he endeared himself to them with a calculated scruffiness that bordered on studied indifference and made him appear to be exactly what he wasn’t--just one of the guys. The roll-top desk, former newspaperman’s battered manual typewriter and framed copy of Howard Beale’s anti-television speech from “Network” were some of the humanizing stage props that accompanied him from job to job.

Just as important, as Boyer notes, Sauter “had the most marvelous way of darting on and off the record in the course of a conversation with a reporter, casually dropping nuggets in the background pauses, which made it seem as if he were dishing the real dirt.”

And later, according to Joyce, Sauter would demean the same reporter behind his back.

Joyce joined Sauter in lying to the press when it served his purpose and in using news leaks to shape coverage of CBS News, and he seems now to applaud Sauter’s manipulative style even as he writes about it somewhat snidely. What an ugly, hypocritical spectacle this is--executives of a respected and supposedly principled news organization gloating over their ability to manipulate the media covering them.

When Joyce was fired in early 1986, he was succeeded by the man he had succeeded, Van Gordon Sauter, who lasted eight months before giving way to the current president of CBS News, Howard Stringer.

The Rather newscast leads the ratings again, but Boyer is one who believes that it has become a “video tabloid” and that Stringerism and Sauterism, for better or for worse, are indistinguishable.

Courage.