Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...legalization has become the idea of the moment. That in itself shows the intensity of the national frenzy that has erupted once again to do something -- anything -- about drugs and related crime. Polls show drugs emerging as the hottest issue in the presidential election. In a New York Times-CBS News survey last week, 16% of those questioned called drugs the nation's No. 1 problem. It has direct political consequences: respondents thought Democrats would do a better job than the Administration in fighting drugs. They favored Michael Dukakis over George Bush, reinforcing a trend that first appeared...
Peter Boyer's version of the same period, Who Killed CBS? (Random House, $18.95), is a more balanced and skillfully written account. Boyer, who spent ten months as media critic for the CBS Morning News in 1985, is now TV reporter for the New York Times. One subject on which he is better, oddly, is Ed Joyce. Boyer lucidly describes the missteps that caused Joyce to fall into disfavor with his staff. Soon after becoming news president, for instance, Joyce tried unsuccessfully to move Sandy Socolow, the respected former executive producer of the CBS Evening News, from the London bureau...
...book belongs to Sauter, who served two tours as news chief before being forced out of the company in 1986. It was | Sauter, Boyer writes, who coaxed the Evening News away from bland Washington stories and toward an emphasis on heart-tugging TV "moments"; who ruthlessly divided the CBS News staff into "yesterday" people (those identified with the Murrow-Cronkite era) and "today" people (the younger, TV-fluent crowd); who pushed for hiring Phyllis George as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. "Sauter was in charge," writes Boyer, "and it was clear that he wasn't there to validate...
...Boyer oversimplifies. Many of the changes at CBS News would have occurred with or without Sauter; nor have all of them been bad. (They have certainly not been unique to CBS.) Boyer is on the shakiest ground in his final chapter, in which he tries to fit the events of the past year -- when CBS News' fortunes have improved -- into his anti-Sauter thesis. His assertion that Rather's newscast has degenerated into a "broad-reaching video tabloid" seems particularly unfounded...
...both books leave an outsider bemused. To be sure, CBS News has gone through troubled times, and the questions raised here are serious ones for all of TV journalism. But much of this inside stuff is little more than the predictable sturm und drang of corporate politicking. Couldn't the conflict between yesterday people and today people, for example, be explained less ominously as the normal tendency of new management to favor its own people over the previous regime's? Aren't clashes like the one between Rather and Joyce common to any large organization employing strong-willed creative people...