Pressure on CBS May Bring Rooney Back Early

The Andy Rooney affair has become a monkey on CBS’ back, much more important than whether Dan Rather finishes first or last in the ratings. And a flurry of reports Friday suggesting that Rooney might return soon to “60 Minutes”--from which he was suspended after remarks about blacks that he denied making--indicates the severe public pressure the network has been under.

“I’m told there was an informal meeting Wednesday” between Rooney and CBS News President David Burke, a network spokesman said. He added that “no decision has been made,” and, while doubting that Rooney could show up as early as Sunday, acknowledged that anything is possible. Most reports felt the lifting of the three-month suspension without pay, if it comes, could occur within a month.

Barring a dramatic last-minute change, Rooney will be absent from “60 Minutes” Sunday for the third consecutive broadcast following the remarks about blacks attributed to him in The Advocate, a Los Angeles-based gay magazine, and the publication in the same issue of a letter in which he said that he did not consider homosexuality “to be normal.” The letter was written to apologize for a remark on his December CBS news special that offended gays.

He was suspended Feb. 8 after disclosure of the letter and the quotes claiming that he told The Advocate that “blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children.” As of Friday, the CBS spokesman said, the network had received 5,234 phone calls about the matter--5,158 favorable to Rooney. In addition, he said, 4,127 letters had been received, 4,093 supporting the suspended newsman, a veteran journalist and curmudgeonly humorist for “60 Minutes.”

A CBS source said that even Rooney was telling people he was coming back. “60 Minutes” has dropped out of the Top 10-rated shows since Rooney’s departure.

On Sunday, ABC will rerun an hour of its skyrocketing new series, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” against “60 Minutes” from 7-8 p.m. ABC says that, at the moment, this is just a one-time occurrence to make room for its three-hour special that follows, “Challenger,” about the spacecraft tragedy. “Videos” normally is broadcast from 8-8:30 p.m.

The reports of Rooney’s possible early return angered the Gay & Lesbian Alliance, which issued a statement in New York on Friday saying: “We continue to support CBS News’ suspension of Andy Rooney, and would be very disappointed if the network caved into public pressure.” The Alliance said that his remarks in his year-end CBS special also warranted his suspension, adding: “We challenge CBS to publicly declare that Rooney’s suspension was in large part due to his anti-gay comments.”

Niles Merton, publisher of the Advocate, said Friday that he was not planning an editorial comment about Rooney’s possible early return: “We let the story speak for itself. We’ve never had any editorial position about Mr. Rooney’s presence on the air or off the air. It’s really CBS’ job. It’s up to the (Advocate) readership to decide whether what Mr. Rooney said was sufficient to move them to do something about it.”

Adding to the unsettling nature of the furor has been the uncommunicative and somewhat indefinite stance of CBS News at a time when it should have cleared the air, which is still thick with questions. As a result, the ripples of the Rooney case grew wider, with critics raising such issues as TV’s limits on freedom of expression. And from the beginning, there was the oddly inconclusive CBS manner of discussing Rooney’s return.

In suspending Rooney, Burke said that the newsman’s future would be considered at the end of the three-month period. Yet only days after this statement, Mike Wallace said in a “60 Minutes” commentary that after the three months are up, “We who have been his colleagues through the years surely look forward to his return.”

Well, surely that statement had to be approved. It sounded as if Burke backed off from the more ominous original suspension announcement, perhaps because of the public response supporting Rooney, or perhaps because that was part of the idea all along. It sounded as if Rooney was definitely coming back. Was Wallace’s comment a subtle announcement? If a return was set, why didn’t Burke say so flat out?

Burke’s suspension of Rooney seemed to many to be a reaction specifically to the alleged remarks about blacks in The Advocate, although the newsman denied making them. Does that mean that CBS considers insults to blacks a greater offense than insults to gays? This would be reprehensible. Reports that followed Rooney’s suspension suggested that his comments about gays were a factor in CBS’ action. If this was so, why didn’t the network just say so flat out, as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance asks?

It would at least have sent the message to the public that the concerns of gays are to be treated with respect.

Rooney never wavered in rejecting the statment about blacks and watered-down genes. The remark is absurdly simple-minded at best, and abhorrent at worst. The conversation was not tape-recorded, and Rooney and others believe that CBS thus was taking the position of finding him guilty until he is proven innocent.

But because CBS has been uncommunicative on the matter, we are simply stuck with taking one side or the other, or just not knowing, which is extraordinarily unfair to everyone involved, and the public as well. Possibly, of course, Burke knows something he is not telling and is acting with Solomon-like wisdom, taking the heat of severe criticism in order not to exacerbate the situation.

On the other hand, possibly he just erred in the way he handled things. CBS has gotten some bad press regarding the case. On Thursday, one of Burke’s counterparts, NBC News President Michael Gartner, raised the Rooney matter in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. Writing about censorship and attempted censorship in such areas as the record industry, a newsletter and TV shows, Gartner included Rooney, saying that all these cases were “awful” because censorship “robs us of our freedom.”

By not simply biting the bullet and being more forthcoming, CBS has left doubts all over the place. The doubts raised question after question, and in a way that may not be entirely bad because at least it gets us thinking about such things as the limits and freedoms of TV as an arena of public comment.

On March 30, for instance, CBS has scheduled Rush Limbaugh, the controversial, nationally syndicated radio personality, who is known for his anti-gay comments, as the guest host on the late-night, one-hour “Pat Sajak Show.” But Rooney, who was nailed for anti-gay comments and then apologized--though not to the satisfaction of his critics--has been out in the cold since Feb. 8, and it is not likely he will be offered an hour special on CBS.

A curious place, television. And, the Rooney case aside, CBS’ waffling makes us think also of another curiosity--that old and often forgotten fact that the airwaves belong to the public. Presumably, that means all the public. But in the real world, that’s just not the case at the networks, where the mass audience imposes an essentially middle-road uniformity on most programming, especially where opinions are concerned. As one TV observer noted, networks believe in free speech so long as the views expressed don’t make them nervous.

CBS is nervous. But it needs to come clean. Does it have reason--proof--to disagree with its former anchor, Walter Cronkite, who said that Rooney sometimes made “outrageous comments” but was not a racist and that the silencing of his opinions would indicate “a dangerous weakness in our pluralistic society”? You’d think CBS News would give us the whole story, if it has it.

And a substantial on-air response by gays, on CBS, might well have righted that wrong--yet also preserved free speech--after Rooney said in his special that “many of the ills which kill us are self-induced,” citing “too much alcohol, too much food, homosexual unions, cigarettes.”

Soul-searching became almost a way of life at CBS News in the 1980s--from Rather’s on-camera confrontation with then-Vice President George Bush to Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit against the network over his actions in the Vietnam War. Now CBS has faced more soul-searching in dealing properly with Rooney, who won his first Emmy for the network in 1968 for writing a program narrated by Bill Cosby, “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed.”

There seems little doubt that CBS, by not acting with total openness and frankness since the suspension began, only worsened and lengthened a situation that could have been handled with dispatch.