Convulsions at CBS

In New York City's RCA Building one afternoon last week, top news executives of the ABC and NBC television networks were waiting for the man from CBS, so that they could begin discussing joint coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial, coming up next month in Israel. But CBS's man, Sig Mickelson, 47, president of CBS's news division, never showed up. Just minutes before the meeting in the RCA Building, Mickelson resigned.

Mickelson's departure was fresh evidence of the top-level convulsions that have shaken CBS's news division since a sweeping reorganization was undertaken last December. Ordered by CBS President Frank Stanton, it put the division under a newly formed News Executive Committee headed by Attorney Richard S. Salant, 46, who has spent much of his nine years with CBS as the network's public-and Government-relations representative in Washington. Just two days before Mickelson walked out, his second in command, News Vice President John F. Day, 47, quit because the reorganization had made his position "untenable." "We have lost rating wars before. What's going on now is incredible," he said. Day darkly predicted more defections to come.

The trouble in CBS's news department is something that no reorganization, however sweeping, is likely to cure. In Douglas Edwards, CBS still has one of the best of the television newscasters. But aside from Edwards, the network, which pioneered in television newscasting and for years stood a tall first in the field, is now losing out to its competitors. During the Kennedy inauguration last month, NBC's news team of Chet Huntley and Dave Brinkley drew more viewers than CBS and ABC combined; in Election Year 1960. Huntley and Brinkley consistently topped CBS at the party conventions, all during the campaign, and on election night as well. The rise of Huntley and Brinkley has exposed CBS's weakness. Said a rival network executive last week: ''They rolled a long time on their reputation of being best in the business. During those years, they brought in very little new blood."

The old blood had been instilled in CBS news during the war by Edward R. Murrow, some of whose proteges imitated his sepulchral tones and adopted his left-of-center emotions; the so-called "Murrow Boys" included Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood and Larry Le Sueur. The Murrow style has long since come to seem stale, and the proof lies in the widespread acceptance of the far more informal Huntley-Brinkley format. But CBS's problems go even farther back. When Sig Mickelson joined CBS in 1949, he began trying to build his own news organization, and a Murrow-Mickelson rift developed that was never repaired. In 1958, Murrow's program, See It Now, was dropped; Murrow himself, far off form, took a year's leave in 1959; since returning last July, he has played only a minor role in CBS news coverage, left the network last month after his appointment as director of the U.S. Information Agency.

To replace Mickelson as president of the news division, CBS President Stanton named Attorney Salant. John Day's successor is Blair Clark,-- 43, a onetime St. Louis and Boston newsman, former publisher of a New Hampshire weekly, and CBS radio correspondent since 1953. whose new title is general manager and vice president of the news division, and who graduated from Harvard in Jack Kennedy's class.

* Son of the late U.S. District Court Judge William Clark, who anticipated Repeal by three years in a 1930 decision which held that the 18th Amendment was invalid because it flouted the will of the people. Appointed Chief Justice of the U.S. Appeals Court in West Germany after the Nuernberg trials, Clark kept up a running feud with U.S. High Commissioner James Conant, in 1953 refused to leave the bench when notified of his dismissal, was finally dislodged when the State Department yanked his diplomatic passport. Judge Clark died in 1957.

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