Tisch Orders Overhaul of CBS News Division : Television: Some see the ‘pooling’ of technicians, expected to cut overtime costs, as a move to centralize the news operation.

CBS Inc. Chief Executive Laurence A. Tisch has ordered a major restructuring of CBS News that severely undercuts the authority of CBS News President David Burke at a time when Burke has been trying to make up for ground lost during years of upheaval at the news division.

The changes ordered by Tisch come when CBS is already reviewing its staffing levels and may eliminate about 50 positions, many inside the news division, as well as cut back on the use of free-lance producers and crews.

According to CBS sources, Tisch wants to put authority over hundreds of network engineers into the hands of a corporate-level executive who could freely assign them to the news, sports and entertainment divisions as needed rather than have them work exclusively for a particular show or division, as currently is the case.

Such a move, the reasoning goes, would save the network millions of dollars annually by limiting overtime pay for technicians. Cameramen, for instance, can and do earn over $100,000 a year because of overtime charges. The reorganization is also intended to raise the productivity of engineers and technicians by better scheduling their time.

The plan is not being greeted with open arms inside the news division because CBS News producers believe that the skills of a news editor or a sports editor--to take one example of the positions affected--are not necessarily transferable. “What the newspeople are concerned about is some mega-event breaking and their (cameramen) are all off shooting a soap opera,” explained one CBS official, who asked not to be identified.

Under the current system, each program such as “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” or “CBS This Morning,” as well as sports broadcasts and daytime soap operas, has its own crew of tape editors, audio engineers and control room technicians who work solely for those shows or within their respective divisions. The new system would create a “pool” of technicians who could be dispatched to work on any particular program regardless of its division.

Programs such as “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours” are said to be exempt from the plan because of special skills required of people who work on “long form” news programs. Also, most of the technicians would continue to be associated with specific programs to preserve the current system as much as possible, and job cuts are expected to be made primarily through attrition.

Although Burke was brought aboard with a mandate to revitalize CBS News and shut down damaging leaks to the press, his 30-month tenure nonetheless has been plagued by setbacks. The flagship “CBS Evening News” program fell from first to third in the ratings and “CBS This Morning” suffered heavy turnover among producers and talent while continuing to languish in a distant last place.

Tisch’s decision points up the growing frustration of Burke in running CBS News. The former No. 2 executive at ABC News, Burke was accustomed to division heads being given great latitude in management decisions and not being overruled by corporate bosses. This has not been his experience at CBS, where, for example, he recently had to reverse himself on “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney’s suspension after a ratings dip in the program forced Burke to reinstate Rooney.

More than simply a new policy on work rules, however, the technicians’ pool is aimed directly at what Tisch believes to be the unbending ways of CBS News: that the division, despite repeated calls to adapt, has ignored changes in the marketplace that make its way of doing business outdated.

Each of the three networks spends about $250 million annually to gather, produce and broadcast news. But a revolution in technology over the past 10 years has made it possible for viewers to get most of the top stories of the day before the evening network news programs come on the air.

Only technicians and engineers at CBS Broadcast Center in New York will be affected by the plan. Crews in CBS News domestic and foreign bureaus routinely work for a variety of programs.

Some old guard CBS News producers see Tisch’s order to further “centralize” the news operation as a refusal by him to acknowledge that the process of collecting, editing and transmitting news is by nature difficult to plan because it cannot take into account events like the upheaval in Eastern Europe, which caused CBS News’ budget to balloon last year.

“This is like electing a President because he says he’s going to cut waste and fraud in Washington,” said a CBS News producer who did not want to be named. “But Reagan left office with a record deficit, and this is really not any different.”