Reporter’s Love for CBS Long Extinguished : Television: Bert Quint, 30-year news veteran and foreign correspondent, minces no words as he slams the TV network--’I think they’re despicable’--and laments the death of journalism.

The fax came from Rome.

The sender was that tough CBS News warhorse, the foreign correspondent sent in to cover so many hot spots--dodging bullets, seeing comrades die and at one point having a plane shot down from under him in Laos--that they called him the fireman.

“You might be interested in my departure from the company, the view on the way out after 30 years,” wrote 62-year-old Bert Quint.

His fax was no love note to the company he began working for as a radio stringer in Cuba in 1961.

While avoiding the mass firings that brought so much criticism earlier, CBS has continued quietly shedding itself of veteran correspondents, producers and camera teams, clearing out broadcast journalists to make room for broadcast performers.

Among the sheddees is Quint, who has been one of broadcasting’s most solid foreign correspondents, serving his longest stints for CBS in Rome and Warsaw. Soon, he and his wife, Diane, and their two teen-age daughters will leave Rome for new lives in Boulder, Colo., where Quint hopes to do some teaching at the University of Colorado.

“CBS is trying to give the impression that this is a nice, graceful parting of the ways, that the termination is mutual, but it is not a graceful thing,” he said by phone from Rome. “I had planned to resign in the coming summer, but I was holding on because I didn’t want to give them (CBS management) ideas about (closing) the Rome bureau. As it turned out, I didn’t have to.”

Quint said that two CBS “hatchet people” showed up without warning one night last month and “overnight did away with the bureau.” CBS will retain a presence in Rome in the person of correspondent Allen Pizzey, he said, but the network is closing the office and has bought out his contract.

“They obviously think I am old-fashioned and dull and uncharismatic and don’t dye my hair. For my part, I think they’re despicable. My feeling is that of a man who suddenly learns that a woman he stopped loving years ago doesn’t love him anymore.”

The president of the news division Quint stopped loving is Eric W. Ober, the executive producer of the evening newscast he no longer works for is Eric Sorenson, and the network’s ultimate decision-maker is board chairman Laurence A. Tisch, a ruthless cost-cutter said to have no soft spot for news.

“It would have been more painful if I had been fired by the people who used to run CBS News,” Quint said. “These guys were not saints. They could be ruthless bastards too. But they were people of stature. They were journalists. They believed in the news business. They had pride.”

Lest anyone think Quint has withheld his criticism until the guillotine decapitated him, he mentions that he has always had “too big a mouth for my own good.”

He recalled the time a few years ago when CBS News had gathered its foreign correspondents for a self-congratulatory dinner in Vienna. “This was when we had just started doing stories about painted dogs and the different types of coffee one drinks, and everyone was toasting how great this new CBS was. I raised my glass and made a toast to a dead colleague-- journalism . There was utter silence. I was kept off the evening news for most of that year. These guys don’t have a sense of humor.”

Always a hard sell on TV, foreign news has been getting even less attention during these recessionary times when all three major networks have been peeling away news budgets and staffs, both domestically and abroad, leaving nuts-and-bolts coverage of foreign news largely to CNN.

“CBS is putting on very little foreign news,” Quint said. “And you saw what happened when Somalia came up. They sent Bob Simon (the network’s Tel Aviv correspondent) and Pizzey, two very good reporters. But then they sent in people from the U.S. they wanted to give exposure to, people who weren’t foreign correspondents.”

Reporting and writing skills, knowledge of background, history, languages, economics are no longer considered vital for the new broadcasters. Information, even pre-written scripts can be provided in the field through a laptop computer. Pictures? Why send your own crew when you can lift what you need off the airways? One satellite dish up, two or three bureaus down.

And why gather news you don’t intend to put on the air anyway? The voiceover section of “The CBS Evening News,” of quick shots around the country and the world, is billed as “other news CBS is covering.” It should say, “Other news CBS is not covering but has free pictures of.”

“In Iran a few years ago,” Quint was adding on the phone, “I was working with a producer I hadn’t worked with before, and I noticed he kept jotting things down. Finally, he handed me these papers. It was a script. He was used to working with correspondents for whom he would write the script. That’s how they can afford to hire a guy who looks and sounds good on the air, who is so convincing and can walk at the proper pace when he does his standupper. If he can’t write, they’ve got someone who can write for him.”

Increasingly, CBS News’ day-to-day coverage of Europe consists of a correspondent in the London bureau providing voiceover narration for footage that has been acquired from outside sources.

“If you want pictures, there are all these agencies that will shoot them for you,” Quint said. “The danger is not really knowing who is providing these pictures. We used to always know. And of course, there’s no reason to believe the person (doing the CBS voiceover) because odds are he or she hasn’t been within 3,000 miles of where the story happened.”

The dramatic exception is the Big Story that all three networks inevitably rush to en masse as if summoned by the same trumpet, as with Somalia. “That’s right,” Quint said. “We’ll suffocate one story, with Dan Rather and his fellow suffocators going in. Then we drop it.”

Responding to Quint’s charges Tuesday, a CBS News spokesman said: “We couldn’t disagree more with these comments, and quite honestly we couldn’t be more surprised to hear Bert say these things. He told us he was looking forward to his retirement, and he indicated to us that he had been very well treated at CBS.” The spokesman added, “We also think the journalism at CBS News is better than ever and our ability to cover news worldwide is greater than ever before.”

Packaging is the vital element when you’re pushing used news in the network lot, cosmetics to make the anchor seem younger and the product glitzier. News more and more is treated like photo opportunities and scheduled days in advance.

“The newscast itself is the big package,” Quint explained. “They say you have to have balance, a certain texture or pace. Many times we’ve been told, ‘That’s really a terrific story. Any other day it would have walked on the air. But not today. We’ve got Money Crunch.’

“And there are the individual pieces that have to be packaged properly. The sound bite was never an editorial device. It has always been used for pace, to make the package look as snappy as possible. And OK, you have to have graphics. There’s nothing wrong with making a piece look exciting as long as it really is exciting. The problem is when the packaging is more important than the substance.”

Is that a knock against Rather, who is managing editor as well as anchor of “The CBS Evening News”?

“Rather is an excellent journalist,” Quint said. “But he is putting on a crappy program. He once told me a few years ago, ‘Bert, things are changing and we have to learn the new dance steps.’ I think Rather learned the new dance steps. I know I didn’t.”