Press: Discord in the House of Murrow

The conversation surely ranks as one of the oddest in the annals of broadcast journalism. During lunch at a Manhattan restaurant two weeks ago, Don Hewitt, executive producer of 60 Minutes, asked CBS Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski a question. Would the company ever consider selling CBS News? If so, said Hewitt, he and several of the division's brightest stars, including Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer and Bill Moyers, would like to buy it. "I told him CBS News is not for sale. It never was, never is," recalls Jankowski. "I didn't take it seriously."

Hewitt, concerned about recent CBS takeover attempts by Ted Turner and a right-wing group called Fairness in Media, says he was only trying to protect the news division from possible meddling by ideologues and corporate raiders. Yet some CBS staffers contend that Hewitt was implicitly taking a swipe at the team of Van Gordon Sauter, executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group, and Edward Joyce, president of CBS News. Though Hewitt denies that Sauter and Joyce were his targets, many CBS employees blame the duo for low morale within the division. At the same time, an internal struggle is being waged over how CBS News should be run and the way news should be presented. For some veterans, nothing less is at stake than the legacy of CBS Icon Edward R. Murrow. Says a long-term CBS correspondent: "The issue is what kind of product ought to be going out in the name of CBS News."

Morale suffered its greatest blow last month when 125 news positions were eliminated and 74 employees were dismissed. The cutbacks followed CBS's decision in August not to renew the contract of Supreme Court Correspondent Fred Graham, who reportedly earned $250,000 a year. The reductions, which affected 10% of the 1,250-member staff, were designed to help pare $6 million from the division's estimated $225 million budget. Though the savings were part of a company-wide austerity program put into effect after CBS bought back 21% of its own stock for nearly $1 billion last summer, some news personnel felt that Sauter and Joyce should have fought to keep their department immune. Others were upset over how the firings were managed. "People were out at work in the morning, were told to come in, clear out their desks and not come back ever," says a Washington correspondent.

For many staffers, the firings underscored their fear that the loyalties of Sauter, 50, and Joyce, 52, no longer belong to the news division but to Black Rock, the nickname for CBS Inc.'s Manhattan headquarters. According to their critics, the two men have their feet firmly on the corporate ladder and are eager to advance upward. Though both spent much of their careers as journalists (Sauter worked as a newspaperman for nine years, while Joyce began as a radio reporter), they made their reputations in management positions. Sauter served as the network's chief censor and head of the sports division before becoming president of CBS News in 1982, while Joyce served as general manager of several CBS-owned television stations. When Sauter moved to his present post in 1983, Joyce took over as president.