Hard Times at a "Can-Do" Network

By Richard Zoglin

The picket line outside the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan got an injection of star power last Monday morning. A band of network heavyweights, including Dan Rather, Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer, showed up to support striking members of the Writers Guild, who walked out two weeks ago over issues of job security. The featured speaker, however, was a less well known correspondent named Ike Pappas, whose current celebrity derives from the fact that he has just lost his job. "I feel very poorly for the people who have to get up every morning and pretend to work for CBS News," he told the crowd. "It's not CBS News anymore."

The debate swirling through the corridors of CBS and the rest of the broadcast world last week was whether Pappas was right. In the most bruising round of layoffs yet at CBS's beleaguered news division, some 230 of 1,200 staffers had been let go, part of an effort to slash $30 million from the news operation's annual budget of nearly $300 million. Among the casualties: three bureaus (Warsaw, Bangkok and Seattle), 14 on-air correspondents (including Law Specialist Fred Graham and Economics Contributor Jane Bryant Quinn) and scores of other employees, ranging from low-paid support staff to veteran producers.

The "Slaughter on 57th Street," as some started calling it, raised an impassioned outcry. New CBS Chief Executive Officer Laurence Tisch roiled staff emotions further when he tried to shift responsibility for the layoffs to News President Howard Stringer. "I never said to Howard, 'We have to cut the budget at the news division,' " he told the New York Times. Stringer was aghast. After a two-hour meeting between the two, Tisch, who had suggested cutting the news budget by up to $60 million, issued a memo admitting that Stringer proposed the cuts only as an alternative to bringing in an outside consultant to do the job.

The cutbacks raised other hackles, both inside and outside the network. Word leaked out last week that a dozen of CBS's high-priced stars, including Rather and Sawyer, had offered to take substantial pay decreases if that would save jobs. But the company refused, arguing that positions had to be eliminated for long-term efficiency. Rather wrote an op-ed page article for the Times, headlined FROM MURROW TO MEDIOCRITY?, in which he condemned the layoffs and worried about a "product that may inevitably fall short of the quality and vision it once possessed." Two Democratic members of a House subcommittee on telecommunications, Dennis Eckart of Ohio and John Bryant of Texas, called for hearings on whether the cost paring at CBS and other networks is in the public interest.

Many CBS insiders concede that inefficiencies do exist. The network's news budget has grown almost 250% in just nine years, and even allowing for inflation it is hard to argue that the quality and amount of coverage have proportionately increased. With limited broadcast time available, many CBS correspondents are underutilized. Some staffers noted wryly that Pappas got more airtime after being fired than before. "Who is really going to miss the Seattle bureau?" asks a veteran CBS correspondent. Stories in that area will now be handled by the Los Angeles bureau. Other bureaus will similarly pick up the slack elsewhere. "What we've done," says Stringer, "is redesign CBS News to move it into the 1990s, to make it more efficient."

CBS is left with about 80 reporters and correspondents after the cuts, roughly the same number as at NBC and ABC. Still, the reduction of manpower in the field "hurts us badly," says Evening News Executive Producer Tom Bettag. "What you're going to lose is a reporter on the scene when you wish you had a reporter on the scene. You cannot have less original reporting and not have the quality suffer." CBS, like both of its belt-tightening network rivals, will probably depend more often on footage from other sources, such as local stations and syndicated services. Indeed, Rather has already begun narrating more stories on the CBS Evening News, stories that might earlier have been handled by a reporter in the field.

The damage may be worse on other programs, since the Evening News and the network's second showcase, 60 Minutes, were relatively lightly hit. The CBS Morning News, for instance, lost 28 of about 75 positions; as a result, viewers will probably see less original material and more warmed-over stories from the previous night's news. Other cuts (29 of 71 positions were eliminated in the archives department, for example) will have a subtler impact. "When you have diminished resources for research and for library footage, you go with a less polished production editorially," says one producer. "That may not be evident to the viewer. But you know it."

The biggest problem CBS faces is the now widespread internal belief that the news organization's best days are behind it. "The people who are left seem more depressed than the ones who were laid off," says Bonnie Arnold, a Washington producer who was let go. Some big names have been working to rekindle confidence. 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt and Correspondent Mike Wallace met with Tisch and urged him to spell out his plans more specifically, but indicated they were reassured that he still backs a strong news operation. Walter Cronkite, the former anchorman who now sits on the CBS board of directors, reportedly had a shouting confrontation with Tisch, but emerged from a board meeting last week with a measured endorsement of management. "I think the necessity of getting that fat out of the budget is definitely there," he said. "I only quarrel over the tactics."

His successor, Rather, even felt compelled last week to make an on-air attempt to rally the troops, signing off Wednesday's newscast on behalf of "your can-do CBS Evening News." The question that remains, of course, is whether CBS News can do with less.

With reporting by Mary Cronin and Naushad S. Mehta/New York