Press: Hard Times at a Can-Do Network

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."