CBS Chief to Reporters: ‘Don’t Write Us Off Too Easily’ : Television: Howard Stringer defends network, pointing out that revenues are up, as is advertising sold for the fall season.

When CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer stood before an annual gathering of TV reporters in Universal City on Thursday, he might as well have been facing a firing line.

The once-mighty CBS, last season’s No. 1 network, has been pushed around in the past six months by the upstart Fox network, which stole CBS’ broadcast rights to NFL football and a handful of powerful CBS station affiliates, forcing the older network to sign up some weaker stations. Furthermore, advertisers don’t seem impressed with any of CBS’ new programs for the fall.

“We’ll miss the NFL, but we’ll wait and see how the football bounces,” Stringer said. He expressed hope that CBS’ strategy to counter football games on Sundays with movies for women, based on Harlequin romance novels, will earn ratings.

Stringer vigorously defended his network, pointing out that CBS revenues are up, as is the amount of advertising the network has already sold for the fall season.

The fall sitcom “The Boys Are Back,” starring Suzanne Pleshette and Hal Linden as parents who can’t quite get their adult children to leave the nest, is the highest-testing pilot in network history, he said. And no drama since “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” has tested as well as the upcoming “Touched by an Angel,” about an angel dispatched from heaven to offer people advice at turning points in their lives.

In fact, Stringer maintained, CBS will retain its prime-time ratings crown for the fourth straight year next season.

“I don’t take it at all lightly, but I think we will be able to harness our dismay over what happened into competitive anger,” he said. “I have no fear that I can harness this group and attack in the fall and win the season. Don’t write us off too easily.”

One positive for Stringer is the possible addition of Tom Snyder to host a late-night talk show produced by David Letterman’s company, following Letterman at 12:35 a.m. Letterman has been the biggest proponent of Snyder, a talk-show fixture from the 1970s who has been hosting his own program on cable’s CNBC channel.

“They like each other. They are amused by each other. They are impressed by each other,” Stringer said.

Although negotiations with Snyder are not concluded, Stringer was talking about the show as a done deal. CBS executives at one point expressed concern that Snyder might not be the best fit with Letterman’s flip humor, but Stringer has come around, comparing the sort of nostalgic resurgence of Snyder with crooner Tony Bennett.

“Trying to top Letterman with another comic is virtually impossible,” Stringer said. “Tom Snyder cuts across generations very effectively. He can talk to almost everybody. I like the idea of a dramatic contrast to comedy. (Snyder) has the kind of range that Larry King has developed, and the intelligence and sensitivity to capture the center of that late-night audience.”

CBS also wants a known commodity in that time period to draw an audience and act as a sort of bridge for people into the network’s morning news show. “I don’t think a brand-new comedian would have lasted 10 seconds in that time period,” he said.

Stringer would not say when Snyder would debut on CBS. One of the problems in negotiations with Snyder has been that many CBS stations would likely choose to push his show back into the wee hours of the morning. At the urging of the network, 80% of CBS stations are currently airing Letterman at 11:35 p.m. But now they want to save the post-Letterman time slot for valuable syndicated programming, with which they make more money.