CBS: Expanded Profile

By Lowell Ponte
Discover The Networks
2005

CBS (formerly the Columbia Broadcasting System) is one of the three biggest television and radio networks in the United States , rivaled in size only by ABC and NBC.

Since 2000 CBS has been owned by the giant media conglomerate Viacom, which began as CBS Films, the television syndication division of CBS. Renamed Viacom International in 1971, it became an independent company two years later because of new Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibited CBS from owning syndication companies.

CBS began broadcasting in September 1927 because the new NBC radio networks did not include among its stars any of the clients of talent agent Arthur Judson. Judson responded by launching his own network - United Independent Broadcasters - which soon merged with the Columbia Phonograph Company to form the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting Company.

The new network, which acquired 22 affiliates and 16 employees, lost money. In January 1929 it was sold for $400,000 to a tobacco fortune heir who had seen radio ads successfully sell his family's La Palina cigars. His name was William Paley.

"Paley's great gift," wrote media historian Albert Auster, "was in recognizing talent. He soon signed singers such as Bing Crosby, Kate Smith and Morton Downey for the network. Unfortunately, as soon as some of them gained fame at CBS they were lured away by the far richer and more popular NBC."

One of Paley's innovations had been to offer free programming to independent stations in exchange for options on advertising time, but this required him to create programs of value. For years CBS aired the demagogic speeches of Father Charles Coughlin to attract listeners, but in 1931 Paley removed Coughlin and tried a new path to success.

If NBC dominated radio with entertainment, CBS would become the network that listeners turned to for news. Paley created a news division headed by former New York Times editor Edward Klauber and former United Press reporter Paul White. As Europe slid into war, Klauber sent to London a young reporter whose style would define broadcast news for a generation - Edward R. Murrow.

"This is London ," Murrow would tell CBS radio listeners during World War II, giving first-hand vivid descriptions of Nazi bombings and the courageous spirit of the British. Murrow was joined by former newspaper left reporter William L. Shirer and a circle of journalists who came to be known as "Murrow's boys," among them Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Winston Burdett, Richard C. Hottelet and Howard K. Smith.

After the war CBS had grown rich and powerful enough to buy away the talent at NBC, signing performers such as Jack Benny, Red Skelton and Burns & Allen. And with the dawn of television, CBS became home to shows such as I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan, Arthur Godfrey and Gunsmoke that kept it atop the TV ratings for nearly 20 years.

Murrow, always smoking the cigarettes that would eventually kill him, made the transition from radio to television with his news series See It Now. The show's tone and subject matter was often liberal. Murrow pushed topics such as farm labor and immigration and gave his documentaries ideology-laden titles such as "Sweatshops of the Soil." On March 9, 1954 Murrow did an investigation directly attacking anti-Communist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy.

With its news division as the jewel in the crown of this "Tiffany Network," CBS in 1950 hired a wire service reporter who had reported from Europe during World War II and 1946-48 ran the United Press bureau in Moscow . His name: Walter Cronkite.

Beginning in 1952 Cronkite anchored CBS coverage of the national political conventions in presidential years. In April 1962 Walter Cronkite became Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News, a position he held until his retirement in 1981.

From the outset critics accused Cronkite of politically slanting the news to the left. This bias, said critics, was evidenced not so much by Cronkite's words as by his choice of what stories CBS covered and by raising his eyebrows and scowling to show his disapproval of statements by conservatives and Republicans. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the usually stiff-lipped Cronkite teared up on camera. In 1964, amid accusations of bias, CBS replaced Cronkite as anchor at the political conventions with Robert Trout and Roger Mudd.

Cronkite strongly influenced the politics and outcome of the Vietnam War. In 1968 the Communist forces in South Vietnam , facing defeat, staged massive kamikaze attacks on U.S. positions in Saigon and elsewhere during the Chinese New Year celebration called Tet. This suicidal "Tet Offensive" was a military disaster that cost the lives of 100 Communist fighters for every American killed. But as a top Communist general said years later on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary series Vietnam , an anti-war American press turned this Marxist military defeat into a political victory for the Communist side.

"It seems now more certain than ever," Walter Cronkite told his audience in a de facto editorial, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate" and that the war is "unwinnable." Cronkite's statement and call for U.S. withdrawal helped turn public opinion against the war into which President Kennedy committed the first 17,000 armed U.S. troops. It also demoralized American troops and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have declared that losing Cronkite meant he had lost Middle America .

When Republican President Richard Nixon refused to withdraw without an agreement that would preserve the anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam, Democrats, abetted by an anti-war press used a burglary at the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate complex and a ham-fisted cover-up to topple his presidency.

Walter Cronkite and CBS played a key role in the political coup that ousted a President re-elected by voter landslide in 1972. The CBS Evening News featured a nightly story under the banner "Watergate." These stories were often trivial or based on rumor or politically-motivated partisan statements. But what mattered was the drumbeat, the hypnotic repetition of "Watergate" night after night on the nation's most-watched newscast, the sheer accumulation of accusations that led many viewers to conclude that beneath so much smoke there must be a fire.

At the time Walter Cronkite insisted that he was non-partisan, objective and fair. Since his retirement, however, Cronkite has acknowledged his liberal political views.

"I believe that most of us reporters are liberal," wrote Cronkite in 2003 in his short-lived syndicated newspaper column. In 2004 he criticized Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry for not embracing the label "liberal," which Cronkite equated with being "progressive," "broad-minded," "unprejudiced," and "beneficent."

"Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents," said Cronkite in 1996, speaking just to his colleagues at the Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner.

During the Vietnam War era even the situation comedies at CBS took on a political tone. One of its hit series was M*A*S*H (1972-83), set during the Korean War but full of anti-war and anti-military themes and implications that the U.S. was wrong to fight Communists who just wanted to rule their own country.

Another top CBS sitcom was All In The Family (1971-79), starring liberal actor Carroll O'Connor as narrow-minded Neanderthal conservative Archie Bunker in weekly confrontation with his smarter anti-war liberal son-in-law Michael, played by Rob Reiner. The show, based on a British comedy, was developed by left activist Norman Lear. Lear founded People for the American Way (PAW), an organization that, beginning with Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, pioneered the techniques of smear and political character assassination used since by liberal Democrats to defeat Republican nominees that is called "borking."

Even a CBS hit as mild as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) had as its co-star radical actor Ed Asner, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and included occasional anti-capitalist themes. CBS later spun off a more overtly left ideological show starring Asner (who also was elected President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) union) as Lou Grant (1977-82) running a town newspaper.

By 1974 the Columbia Broadcasting System had become CBS, Inc. It had also acquired a publishing division (Holt, Reinhart & Winston), a magazine division (Women's Day) and even the New York Yankees (1964-73).

But ominous clouds were on the horizon. One was named Ted Turner, the hotshot Atlanta mogul who created Cable News Network (CNN) and by the mid-1980s was threatening a hostile takeover of CBS. In self-defense, wrote Albert Auster, "CBS turned to Loew's President Lawrence Tisch, who soon owned a 25% share in the company and became president and CEO in 1986." Tisch began drastic budget and personnel cuts, in news as well as other divisions, and the selling off of company assets.

CBS Anchor Dan Rather wrote an Op-Ed titled "From Murrow to Mediocrity" in the New York Times. (In 2004 Rather told one interviewer that on several occasions at night he had seen and spoken with the ghost of Edward R. Murrow in the CBS offices.)

In 1981 Dan Rather had succeeded retiring Walter Cronkite as Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News. Like Cronkite, Rather spent his childhood in and around Houston . CBS network executives saw Rather's dynamic work as a reporter for their Houston affiliate covering Hurricane Carla from Galveston in 1961, and in 1962 he was hired as a correspondent for CBS News. He would, quite by accident as his autobiography described, be the first journalist to report that President John F. Kennedy had died. In 1964 Rather was promoted to cover the White House for CBS.

The style of journalism that characterized Rather's career was soon evident. "Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts," wrote Timothy Crouse in his best-seller about presidential campaign coverage in the Nixon era The Boys on the Bus. "If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star at CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact…."

During a 1974 press conference with President Richard Nixon, the president indicated that the next question belonged to an ABC reporter, but Rather butted in: "Thank you, Mr. President. Dan Rather of CBS News. Mr. President…" By now some reporters were jeering Rather's unethical behavior and others cheering his brazenness, prompting President Nixon to joke: "Are you running for something?" "No, sir, Mr. President," Rather replied arrogantly, "Are you?"

CBS executives debated whether to fire Rather over the controversial White House incident. But veteran anchorman Walter Cronkite was nearing retirement, and CBS's attempt to hire NBC's Tom Brokaw was scrapped after it became public. Rather was the brightest star the "Tiffany network" had to succeed Cronkite.

Dan Rather's first broadcast as the new Anchorman and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News took place March 9, 1981, weeks after Republican Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as President. The anti-Republican bias in Rather's own reporting was already widely criticized, but as Managing Editor of the news the Texan now imposed his slant on all newscast reporting, not just his own. Every bad economic story mentioned "Reaganomics," a label Rather ceased using after economic news turned good. In one report by correspondent Ray Brady, Reagan's success in ending predecessor Jimmy Carter's double-digit inflation was reported as bad news - bad, said Brady, because with no rise in the cost of living, welfare recipients would get no cost of living increases in their welfare checks.

After doing considerable reporting about the alleged Iran-Contra affair during the 1988 presidential race Rather, confronted then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. Bush hit back, asking Rather on camera if he wanted viewers to judge his entire journalistic career by a 1987 incident in which, in a fit of pique that a tennis broadcast had delayed his newscast, Rather walked off the set, leaving affiliate stations with six minutes of dead air. "I would have fired him," said Walter Cronkite of Rather's unprofessional behavior. "There's no excuse for it." Rather evinced a personal animus for President Bush and Bush's son George W. Bush since that confrontation.

Rather's leftward bias, according to former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, caused a rising average age and declining number of CBS news viewers. Rather has been unwilling to employ non-liberal producers or reporters. Rather has almost always deflected questions about his bias by dismissing his critics as partisans.

"You have to understand that Dan Rather is Richard Nixon," Goldberg in Bias recounted a colleague telling him. "If he sees you as an enemy even for a second, you're an enemy for life. And like Nixon, Rather must destroy his enemies…[and] has become what he detested."

"Who among us have not lied about somebody?" said Rather to Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly regarding the truthfulness of President Bill Clinton. "I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things."

In a controversial 1988 documentary, dubbed "The First Rathergate" by National Review reporter Anne Morse, Dan Rather purported to interview Vietnam veterans about atrocities they had committed. But as Morse documented, every claim in Dan Rather's reporting was untrue.

"If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House," said Rather during an interview with President Clinton, "we'd take it right now and walk away winners."

Rather has done friendly interviews with Hillary Clinton, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, but over the years he has demonstrated almost-unrelenting hostility and made negative statements regarding Republicans and conservatives. His outright confrontations with Presidents Nixon and George H.W. Bush are examples of this.

In his 2003 book Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, Bernard Goldberg quotes a Dan Rather news story: "The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor."

"I think Dan is transparently liberal," Rather's CBS colleague Andy Rooney told CNN's Larry King during a 2002 interview. "I always agree with him, too. But I think he should be more careful."

In 2001 Dan Rather helped the Travis County Democratic Party raise $20,000. "Please join us for an evening with DAN RATHER" read the invitations that, as Brent Bozell of Media Research Center reported at the time, arrived with "an RSVP envelope asking for $1,000 for the Democratic Party." Rather later claimed he did not know the event, created by and for his activist, politically-ambitious daughter, was a fundraiser. When asked about it by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Rather said he "wouldn't be surprised" if "critics" used the incident to call him a closet Democrat. "I'm going to get that criticism," said Rather, "whether I deserve it or not."

According to columnist Liz Smith, Rather also took part in a 1988 fundraiser for Democrat Ann Richards in New York City that "gathered up money in buckets" used in 1990 to elect Richards Governor of Texas. Rather's comrade Governor Richards lost her bid for re-election to George W. Bush.

Travis County, Texas includes the liberal capital city Austin . The county party for which Rather appeared at that 2001 fundraiser is heavily connected with local Democratic money man and lobbyist Ben Barnes, the third biggest fundraiser in 2003-04 for Democrats in the United States .

A 2004 controversy over fabricated memos and Rather's reporting that used them against the son of his longtime nemesis President George H.W. Bush reflected several Dan Rather patterns of behavior, including disregard for facts, disdain for fairness and balance, and left partisanship.

Barnes appeared on a September 2004 "60 Minutes II" story in which Rather first displayed documents that purportedly showed that a young George W. Bush had shirked his responsibility in the National Guard during the Vietnam War era. Barnes claimed in that interview to have used political influence to get a young George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, a claim Barnes' own daughter has said her father told her was a lie.

In introducing Barnes, Rather told the CBS audience nothing about the shipwreck of Barnes' political career amid a bribery and stock fraud scandal, nor that Barnes stood to become very wealthy as a toll-collecting "gatekeeper" for White House favors and appointments if Democratic candidate John F. Kerry were elected President. An investigative report by FrontPage Magazine on September 8, 2004 documented Barnes' sordid and sticky-fingered past. Barnes had raised at least $500,000 in campaign contributions for Kerry.

At a minimum, Rather was recklessly unprofessional in doing a report based on documents that CBS's own hired document experts warned showed signs of being bogus, and based on an interview with a known liar and self-seeking partisan. Rather also never told his audience that CBS's experts had questioned the documents' authenticity.

Whether knave or fool, Dan Rather was asking to be disciplined or fired for such unprofessional behavior - or at least taken off air pending completion of an investigation into the incident. But neither CBS nor its parent company Viacom did this. During the final weeks leading up to America 's November 2004 presidential election Dan Rather remained in control of what information about the candidates and issues was broadcast to millions of viewers of the CBS Evening News.

During these weeks, Rather again appeared to be trying to influence the election outcome by airing a story about a woman and various Internet fear-mongers who claimed that young men would be drafted if President Bush were re-elected. The woman depicted by CBS News merely as a concerned mother was revealed by other reporters to be a leftwing activist. The emails CBS cited dealt merely in rumors, not facts or evidence. Military conscription at this time was being raised by Democrats as a scare tactic to motivate otherwise-unconcerned young people to vote against President Bush. With its story, CBS was therefore dovetailing its news with a prime propaganda effort by the Democratic Party.

Such behavior could be worse than unethical, wrote New York Times columnist William Safire. It could be fraud, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Whoever fabricated such documents, wrote Safire, and "then helped cause the fraudulent file to be transmitted by means of television communication to millions of voters for the purpose of influencing a federal election" has committed "no mere 'dirty trick' but a potential violation of federal law."

The longtime producer of CBS's magazine news show 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt, once boasted that he personally had elected President Bill Clinton. During a 60 Minutes interview he arranged with the Clintons and aired immediately following the Super Bowl in 1992 where it would get the biggest TV audience of the year, Clinton acknowledged "causing pain" in his marriage, but left the impression that he had reformed and would sin no more.

CBS's audience was never told that the Clintons had been given all questions in advance. Viewers at home were never told that they were watching a pre-recorded, carefully edited creation. They were never told that the Clintons were given editorial control over the interview, i.e., the power to do as many "takes" of an answer as they wished and the power to select which of these "takes" CBS would broadcast.

The Clintons , like some others the media are eager to interview, have agreed to do certain interviews with conditions attached, e.g., that certain topics will not be raised, or time will be limited, or the like. Hewitt has never made public whether the Clintons demanded control as a precondition of doing this 60 Minutes interview or he offered it as an enticement. What resulted was a de facto infomercial over which the Clintons had editorial control, but which was broadcast to America disguised as an honest, no-holds-barred interview with CBS. This interview, Hewitt believes, rescued Bill Clinton's floundering campaign and made his 1992 election to the presidency possible.

The Clinton Administration, in turn, was very good to CBS. To cite one example, it gave CBS the valuable exclusive rights to broadcast " America 's Millennium Gala" in 2000. Hillary Clinton gave her first late night interview to CBS's David Letterman, where her appearance was carefully scripted by CBS writers so that she knew all questions in advance and was given wise, witty and heartwarming responses….again, an infomercial to advance Clinton political ambitions. Critics during the eight years of the Clinton Administration frequently referred to CBS as the "Clinton BS Network."

By contrast, CBS has portrayed Republicans and conservatives negatively in its range of programming, from news to sitcoms to miniseries. Network Chairman Les Moonves personally green-lighted The Reagans, a controversial miniseries originally scheduled to air on CBS in November 2003 that demonized both former Republican President Ronald Reagan, then in real life in the final stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan. President Reagan was depicted as acknowledging that he was an informer during the Hollywood blacklist era, and as saying of AIDS patients: "They that live in sin shall die in sin."

Pressed, the miniseries' screenwriter, leftwinger Elizabeth Egloff, admitted to the New York Times that no evidence exists that Reagan ever made any such statement. On the contrary, in 1978 Reagan opposed an anti-homosexual ballot initiative in California . The Wall Street Journal's John Fund quoted liberal Reagan biographer Lou Cannon as saying: "Reagan is not intolerant."

This attempted character assassination was produced by two self-proclaimed Hollywood liberals and starred as President Reagan actor James Brolin, husband of left Democrat Barbra Steisand, who was also a producer of the show.

Advance news of The Reagans content caused a public firestorm with revelations not only of the miniseries' partisanship but also of its falsehood in depicting events and conversations that never happened. The Reagans was withdrawn by CBS and aired only on Viacom cable channel Showtime.

Like several of the other major networks, CBS maintains alliances with the print press. CBS maintains a special relationship with the liberal New York Times, one manifestation of which is the CBS-New York Times Poll. ABC maintains a special relationship with the liberal Washington Post and has the ABC News-Washington Post Poll. (So does NBC with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post's corporate sister Newsweek Magazine. National Public Radio (NPR) provides airtime for liberal Slate.com and satellite uplink help for Pacifica Radio and an adjunct radio show of The Nation Magazine. Cable News Network (CNN) cross-promotes its corporate big brother Time Magazine.)

The close relationship between CBS and the New York Times was seen in sharp relief weeks prior to the 2004 presidential election. Reporters from both had been working on a story about chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) at an Iraqi facility. The story "angle," as reporters call it, had been that the Bush Administration had taken this weapons storage depot, then left it unguarded while terrorists stole hundreds of tons of the deadly weapons that could be used to cause havoc elsewhere. Expert testimony would show that, in fact, American forces had found and secured the deadly munitions there.

Few noticed an odd aspect of this story: after claiming for many months that Bush policy had been wrong because no WMDs existed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq , these two anti-Bush news outlets now claimed evidence that such weapons did exist but had been stolen right under America 's nose by terrorists.

CBS planned to air its expose and condemnation of the Bush Administration on its top-rated news show 60 Minutes on the Sunday before the Tuesday presidential election. CBS had coordinated this with the New York Times, which was supposed to publish its version of the story in its same Sunday edition. This would have delivered a devastating one-two punch to the Bush campaign while leaving it only hours to refute the story before election day.

The New York Times, however, detected reporters from other news outlets probing the same story. Rather than get scooped by competing newspapers, the Times rushed into print ahead of schedule with its version of the story. This gave the Bush Administration time to find and present witnesses who nullified the story's impact.

CBS and the New York Times had worked together not just on details of a news story, but also on planning their coordinated release of a story in an obvious attempt to tip a presidential election against the Republican candidate and in favor of his Democratic rival. Only the New York Times' fear of getting scooped by other newspapers prevented this partisan collusion and news manipulation from swaying a national election.