Who Killed CBS?: The Undoing of America`s Number One News Network
By Peter J. Boyer
Random House, 361 pages, $18.95
Prime Times, Bad Times: A Personal Drama of Network Television
By Ed Joyce
Doubleday, 561 pages, $19.95
As even the most casual media-watcher should know, CBS-the onetime proud
”Tiffany” network, the ”House of Murrow,” ”William S. Paley`s candy store”-has become the corporate Job. Bad days, indeed, at Black Rock.
The network`s news division, particularly, has come under close scrutiny, as the books continue to pile up, and reading these latest two entries produces a sort of ”Rashomon” effect. The truth is there somewhere, but maybe it takes a Maria Shriver to ferret it out.
The principal players in both works include CBS News presidents Van Gordon Sauter, Ed Joyce and Howard Stringer, along with ”Anchor Monster” Dan Rather, lady-in-waiting Diane Sawyer and resident intellectual Bill
(”Everybody Calls Me Hamlet, but I Call It Brilliance”) Moyers.
Boyer, TV correspondent of the New York Times and former media critic for CBS News, takes a look at the post-Walter Cronkite era, especially building a case history of the escalating blurring of news and entertainment. It is a meat-and-potatoes book, serviceable and well crafted; it is also rather stolid, and the bewildering barrage of names, job exchanges and inner-sanctum machinations may very well stagger those who are not in the business or related to the heavy-breathing participants.
Boyer takes on such matters as CBS News` profligate spending and consequent cutbacks, the effective banishment of Walter Cronkite and the calculated coronation of Rather, the embarrassing problems with ”Morning News,” the William Westmoreland trial and the insinuating takeover by white knight-in-villain`s-clothing and current CEO Laurence Tisch.
Particularly, Boyer deals with the showbiz-dismantling of the Murrow/
Cronkite/Salant cathedral by such ”infidels” as principal player Sauter, the onetime Chicago newspaperman who quickly rose the CBS corporate ladder to become two-time president of CBS News. He also explores how Sauter and his assistant and successor, Ed Joyce, set about ”tearing down the old order and building the new,” without wasting a lot of time on diplomacy or compassion. While the safari-jacketed, sockless Sauter is depicted as a ”peerless fabulist” who created his own legend and ”worked on his eccentricities,”
Joyce, who took over as president of News in the fall of `83 and was ousted two years later, is characterized as a bright, exceedingly aloof bureaucrat who emulated friend and boss Sauter to the point that he, too, became a fly-fisherman and drank endless cans of Tab. He also, Boyer writes, became Sauter`s hatchetman in a good cop/bad cop arrangement, handled the proscribed layoffs insensitively and finally was brought down by a long-standing feud with Rather-whom Joyce believed was ”unstable.”
In contrast, ”Prime Times, Bad Times” is a creation of the copious, incredibly detailed notes that Joyce made of often-confidential conversations. (He repeatedly has denied that he used a tape recorder.) Joyce is a livelier writer than Boyer-although, undoubtedly, because of his subjectivity, a less reliable one. One also hears an awful lot of ax-grinding in the distance.
It is an unyieldingly self-serving volume in which the author pictures himself as such a humble human being that he even refuses his family`s entreaties to keep a scrapbook. He also paints himself as the stand-up purist, always taking the high ground-whether it be his dedication to documentaries or full coverage of political conventions or the right deportment in the Westmoreland case-and denies charges that he was insensitive to staff layoffs, insisting that he was a scapegoat.
He isn`t so praiseworthy of others, declaring that Bill Kurtis, for one, was not only an ”inept” interviewer on the ”Morning News,” but had a
”tumescent ego,” and then hangs him with a quote from Chekhov about
”provincial celebrities.” (Joyce so compulsively summons up thoughts of everyone from Hugo to Yeats that ”Prime Time” often seems like an update of ”Bartlett`s.”)
Not surprisingly, Rather-whom Joyce pinpoints as the force behind his ouster-comes across as the ultimate ”big-foot” who created his own fiefdom, spreading his tendrils like a kudzu vine, driving out staffers like Morton Dean and Rita Flynn to other networks, sending to Coventry any of his chosen- few correspondents who dare appear on a CBS broadcast other than the
”Evening News” and then humiliating Cronkite on election night in `82 by treating him like ”the ghost of Christmas past.”
He treats mentor Sauter more skittishly, but makes it perfectly clear that he and Rather orchestrated Joyce`s dismissal so that Sauter could return for a second term as CBS News president. He also berates Sauter for his wanting to truncate coverage of the `84 conventions in order to appease the affiliates, and for actually liking Phyllis George. What`s more, when Sauter goes out with friends to a Chinese restaurant, he doesn`t even share.
The book also contains a number of who-cares? sections-Joyce`s pluck-and- luck background, an accounting of the way he shuffled around European bureau chiefs like so many utility infielders-but it is in the nasty department that he sparkles. (In a recent interview, he said if there were a film version, he wanted to be played by Dabney Coleman.) Here he is ridiculing Ms. George for wanting to interview ”that Gandhi woman” (when she was already dead), there he is describing the CBS executives sitting in on Rather`s $20,000 worth of voice-therapy lessons. (”Dan was shown how to give his face a light massage and then asked to practice a series of sounds which began with `woo-woo-woo-woo,` then moved through `woe-woe-woe-woe,` `waw-waw- waw-waw,` and finally `wow-wow-wow-wow.”`)
While the Boyer and Joyce books will be avidly consumed by those with a vested interest in all this, the general reader may find that the 922-page double-dose tells you more than you care to know about Tiffany Town.
Anyway, some candy store.
