Word: sauter
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...duplicitous in personal dealings. Favored correspondents reportedly are accorded a place on Rather's A list and get frequent exposure on the CBS Evening News. Those who cross him -- Morton Dean, Ed Rabel -- are forced into relative obscurity. But the chief Machiavelli in this troubled kingdom is Van Gordon Sauter, the raffishly flamboyant former president of CBS News, who is charged with virtually dismantling the great journalistic tradition fostered by Edward R. Murrow. Dallas was never so lively...
...Prime Times, Bad Times (Doubleday, $19.95) was written by a key insider from this period: Ed Joyce, who served as Sauter's top deputy, succeeded him as news division president in 1983, and was ousted two years later. Joyce was an unpopular figure, viewed by his staff as an aloof hatchet man who set in motion a painful round of layoffs in 1985. Unsurprisingly, he views himself more sympathetically, as a beleaguered defender of traditional news values. His chief enemy, it seems, was Rather. The anchorman was unfailingly polite and supportive in person, Joyce writes, but campaigned for his ouster...
...role of chief villain in Boyer's 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...
...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...
...Stringer largely escaped the in-house criticism directed at Joyce and Sauter, partly because of his solid journalistic credentials and partly, some say, because of his skill at the corporate political game. In his campaign for the presidency, Stringer won the support of such key CBS News figures as Dan Rather, Bill Moyers and 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt. He also sought the advice of two ex-CBS News presidents, Richard Salant and William Leonard, and Burton Benjamin, a longtime CBS News executive who retired last year. Benjamin, 69, had been offered the job of interim president but declined...