On the Outside Looking In : Media: The former president of CBS Television Stations views the network’s latest shuffling with a contented eye from the helm of Channel 39 in San Diego.

For 24 years, Neil Derrough had a front-row seat to the well-documented corporate turmoil that gripped CBS, once known as the “Tiffany of the networks.”

Two weeks ago, when Eric Ober was named president of CBS News, Derrough, now the general manager of KNSD-TV (Channel 39), greeted the news with a certain amount of resignation, a sense that he had seen it all before.

Just for a second, he also must have flashed on his own career, and how close he came to rising to the top of television’s most prestigious organization.

A few years ago, Ober worked for Derrough, who served as president of CBS Television Stations for six years until he left the network in 1986. It was his duty to oversee the operations of the five TV stations CBS owned throughout the country.

“In a large corporation, you spend a certain amount of time, and you make a run for it,” Derrough said over lunch a few days after Ober was named to head CBS News. “Was there a point where I might have liked to be Group Broadcast president? Yeah. But the cards didn’t fall that way.”

Timing is everything, and the 52-year-old Derrough has no regrets.

“CBS had become a different place,” he said.

Channel 39 offers Derrough plenty of challenges. When he took over, it was perennially the third-rated news operation in the city. In his two-year tenure, he has changed the station’s call letters and given it a new identity. After little movement, the station’s ratings have slowly started to move forward.

Now that he has a 3-year-old daughter by his wife of nine years--Sharon Lovejoy, a former CBS correspondent--Derrough’s priorities have changed since his days at the network. He talks about the satisfaction of operating a TV station and the disappointment of not spending more time with his now 25-year-old daughter from his first marriage, a marriage that dissolved during his CBS tenure.

“My life objective is much different today,” he said.

Living and working in San Diego--far from “Black Rock,” the CBS corporate headquarters in New York--has allowed him “to focus on what matters,” he said.

“Family and friends made a difference; it wasn’t all the deals I made,” he said, referring to then and now.

It’s hard, though, for Derrough not to have fond memories of CBS.

“It wasn’t a heyday, it was an era. It had been the dominant TV influence. . . . It was like tampering with the crown jewel of the medium.”

As for the new president of CBS News, Derrough said Ober is the “right guy at the right time.” The news people will “accept him,” and he “knows what the job is,” in the sense that he has been involved at every level of the network for several years.

Most important, Derrough said, “he’s a businessman. He’s been accountable.”

Ober is charged with boosting CBS’ lackluster ratings, stabilizing management and returning some past glory.

According to published reports, Ober got the news job because he was a CBS insider, a contrast to the outsider image of his predecessor--David Burke, a former ABC News executive. Critics said Burke was unable to deal with the intricacies of CBS management, either on financial or personal levels. For 24 years, Derrough was the consummate CBS insider, groomed within the organization, a veteran of the tradition and corporate struggles that shaped the company.

Derrough started in 1962 in the sales departments of CBS Radio stations in Detroit and Boston. In 1967, he took over as general manager of KCBS Radio in San Francisco. While most of his contemporaries were in television “selling (commercial) spots in Los Angeles,” he was running the first all-news CBS radio station on the West Coast.

“Radio was in a changing period,” Derrough said. “Radio was essentially forgotten. All the bright, young, attractive people were running as hard as they could to TV.”

But with videotape, advanced satellite technology and CNN still years away, radio was still the medium with instant news and immediacy. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were an exciting time in history, and news radio flourished.

In 1971, Derrough took the job of general manager of WCBS Radio in New York, the CBS Radio flagship, which was finding success with an all-news format.

“News radio has a lot to do with developing the appetite for news, letting people know that there was an audience for news,” Derrough said.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Derrough and most CBS employees had little doubt who was the guiding hand of CBS: William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Although Paley turned 70 in 1971, he personally interviewed Derrough for the WCBS job, and was still actively involved in all aspects of the organization, meeting with top officers three to four times a years, Derrough said.

In 1974, Derrough moved into television, taking the general manager post of the CBS-owned and -operated WBBM in Chicago.

“Derrough . . . was at WBBM to bring order to the place,” Peter Boyer wrote in his book “Who Killed CBS?” “The ratings and attention WBBM were getting were nice, but it was too maverick. The carte blanche was gone.”

One of Derrough’s first acts was to take Van Gordon Sauter off the air. Often described as something of a Hemingway-esque character in both style and appearance, Sauter would later preside over CBS News during the early 1980s, its most tumultuous time, eventually rising into the CBS corporate structure before being forced out in 1986 in yet another shake-up.

“We called him into the office and told him we were going to take him off the air for Bill Kurtis,” Derrough recalled. “He looked at us, pushed his chair back, and said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go out and get drunk.’ ”

A few years later, Sauter would become Derrough’s boss and, ironically, an ally in the corporate infighting that gripped CBS.

Derrough says the CBS of lore began to come apart in 1978, soon after he had taken over WCBS-TV in New York. In Derrough’s eyes, the problems started when the decision was made to add another level of management to each division of CBS--sports, news and entertainment--creating, in effect, independent fiefdoms.

Until that point, “the network was run like a TV station,” Derrough said. “One guy had run all of it, and each department reported to one guy.”

And, in Derrough’s opinion, it ran well enough. In the new system, each division was looking out for its own success, not that of the company, he said.

In 1981, when Derrough was named president of the CBS Television Stations, the highest post on his side of the corporate ladder, CBS was still riding high, with Walter Cronkite in his last days and the network programming doing well in the ratings.

When CBS network programming started to slip in the ratings, and video and cable started to further cut into the share of the network’s audience, CBS became the focus of a fierce and well-documented corporate battle. Ted Turner talked of a hostile takeover. Newspaper articles said Sen. Jesse Helms wanted conservatives to buy it. Meanwhile, Paley was in his 80s, and the company was taking on a new look.

The mid-1980s became the era of massive budget cuts throughout the organization, most publicly in the news department.

CBS News, the “house that Murrow built,” had always operated aloof from corporate pressures. To many, CBS News represented the heart of CBS, its corporate identity. It didn’t matter how many millions it lost.

In a sense, Derrough says, the company definitely needed to be trimmed, especially the news department. The loss of dozens of employees and a tighter budget, he said, have not drastically hampered the operations of CBS News.

“I’ve seen no evidence of it having a dramatic bearing on how they cover the news,” Derrough said.

But he does object to the manner in which cuts were implemented, particularly calls for mandatory staff cuts, regardless of the division’s efficiency.

Because the TV stations generally operated as money-makers, Derrough for many years worked outside the fray. But, as the company looked for every dollar, the stations were increasingly pulled into the discussion and given the same cost-cutting mandates as the other divisions.

The pressures mounted at every level of the company, Derrough said. He recalls it as an “unpleasant” place to work.

“It was like a palace revolt. Nobody knew who was going to stay, and who was going to be crowned.

“It ended up at a point . . . I had reached a point where I had to leave,” he said.

Derrough said the end came when he was asked to fire Frank Gardner, the general manager of KCBS-TV (Channel 2) in Los Angeles. Three weeks earlier, Channel 2 had debuted an experimental news format called “the wheel,” which featured 20-minute looks at one subject, such as health or fitness. Critics ripped it.

“When I refused to (fire Gardner), they said, ‘Well, it sounds like you’re resigning,’ ” Derrough said.

After taking time off, Derrough went to work for Gillett Communications, first running a station in San Luis Obispo and then taking over Gillett’s San Diego operation in 1988.

KNSD may be far away from New York, but controlling a TV station was always an optional goal of his career if things didn’t work out at CBS, Derrough said. He may miss the chauffeur and the intensity of network life, but he likes the control his current job affords him, the ability to bring change and to interact with the community.

“Running a TV station in a major market is one of the best jobs in the business,” he said.