AN APPRECIATION : Salant Symbolized ‘Fairness,’ ‘Integrity’

The death of former CBS News President Richard Salant on Tuesday recalls a period when the networks dominated television coverage of major events and, with Walter Cronkite as the primary figure, engendered a sense of public trust.

In a coincidence of fate, Salant’s death at 78 comes as TV news, whose standards he helped set, finds its trustworthiness questioned in the wake of last week’s NBC admission that it rigged a truck crash on its magazine series “Dateline NBC”--a low-water mark of increasing broadcast sensationalism.

Salant was president of CBS News from 1961 to 1964 and again from 1966 to 1979. It was during his watch that CBS became the first network to present a half-hour nightly news, expanding from 15 minutes. The “CBS Morning News” and “Sunday Morning” were also introduced during his tenure.

And it is instructive to consider his views of TV news propriety, as expressed in 1988 in the William Benton Lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago:

He criticized “titillating trivia at the expense of important substance” on network evening news. He frowned on music during newscasts: “The music is a fiction, a part of entertainment.”

And this: “I don’t like the almost daily inclusion in the morning broadcasts produced by the network news divisions of segments plugging sports, entertainment and news shows scheduled to appear on the same network. It can’t be simply news judgment: Are only the shows on the particular network newsworthy while those on competing networks almost never are?”

Salant also lamented the “virtual disappearance of serious single-issue documentaries and preemptive instant prime-time specials to provide summaries and analysis of major news events.”

When Salant took over CBS News, there was some apprehension by the staff. In a statement following his death, Cronkite recalled that the executive “was a lawyer by profession with no background in news when he came to CBS News. But he . . . defined for us the standards of ‘fairness’ and ‘integrity.’ ”

Mike Wallace, whom Salant hired in 1963, said: “He was dead-granite honest.”

“60 Minutes” also debuted during Salant’s years but the program’s producer, Don Hewitt, acknowledges that “Dick was very skeptical” of the series. “I was not one of his favorite people. He was one of mine.” But, says Hewitt, “Dick and I made our peace a couple of weeks ago.”

Because of his formal image, Salant surprised some people when, in 1985, he had criticism but also kind words for CBS’ attempt at a jazzy, youth-oriented, one-hour news magazine, “West 57th,” saying: “This is not the end of the old and the beginning of the new journalism.”

e year before, however, in 1984, Salant reacted strongly to sportscaster and former Miss America Phyllis George being made co-anchor of the “CBS Morning News” despite her lack of journalistic experience. He said he was “heartbroken.”

In his book “Who Killed CBS?,” Peter Boyer writes that Salant gave “character” to CBS News as it “was defining itself in the unfolding television age.”

And his adherence to principle made its point yet again in 1990 when he resigned from the board of National Public Radio in protest over the acceptance of news-coverage grants that might have given the impression that corporate backers control program content.

During his CBS years, Salant not only presided over coverage of such stories as the Vietnam War, the Apollo 11 moon landing and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, he also found himself at times in the midst of controversy.

He took heat for the documentary “The Selling of the Pentagon,” which drew fire from Congress and the Nixon Administration. And Salant also found himself on touchy ground with the late network leader William Paley, because of several lengthy reports on the Watergate scandal by the “CBS Evening News.”

Salant’s influence on CBS began in his earlier years when he represented the network in legal cases and encouraged its member stations to produce more public-affairs programming.

CBS News has had a cast of giant personalities. If Salant could hardly match the larger-than-life images of another former CBS News president, Fred Friendly--or such figures as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather--he nonetheless left his own mark. And it represented much of the best of CBS News.