Cbs Evening

NEW YORK -- Dan Rather wouldn't enlist with "60 Minutes II" if Jeff Fager weren't his general."In my later years, I've made a vow to myself that, like Napoleon, I will not follow small men into battle," says Rather, almost standing at attention."

Andrew Heyward was named president of the struggling CBS News division yesterday, succeeding Eric Ober who was fired last month.Heyward, executive producer of the "CBS Evening News With Dan Rather" for the last two years, had been expected to get the job based on a track record showing both the ability to seize opportunities in a changing television universe and a keen sense of the bottom line."

NEW YORK -- Like the groundhog, Rick Gentile, temporarily the most important man in America, only occasionally poked his head out of the mini-control room off to the side of Studio 43 at the CBS Broadcast Center here yesterday.And like the furry animal whose presence indicates an end to winter, the appearance of Gentile, with his curly salt-and-pepper hair stuffed inside a Final Four cap, meant all was well with CBS' NCAA tournament coverage."We had a good day. We just didn't have any buzzer-beaters," said Gentile, CBS Sports senior vice president of production, and the man who heads the team that decides when the Connecticut-Colgate blowout your local station has been assigned becomes the Stanford-Bradley game.

"The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung" was supposed to have a local flavor for Baltimore viewers tonight. Chung was scheduled to co-anchor the broadcast from WJZ -- CBS' Baltimore affiliate -- to give the station a ratings boost on the final week of May sweeps.Instead, Rather will be anchoring alone tonight, and it looks as if Chung is out of a job altogether.CBS News President Eric Ober announced Saturday that, as of today, Rather would be anchoring alone. Furthermore, Ober said, Chung's future at the network was uncertain.

Don't look for CBS to make any changes to the Dan Rather-Connie Chung news anchor team before the network's affiliate meeting next month.Sources at the network said despite the sagging ratings -- mostly because of a weaker affiliate station lineup -- and mounds of press criticizing the "CBS Evening News" team, there are no immediate plans to break it up. A spokeswoman for CBS News had no comment on reports that "60 Minutes" anchor Ed Bradley was a possible...

Low ratings and a lack of vision cost Eric Ober his job as president of CBS News yesterday, as the new Westinghouse management team made its first major move at the struggling network since talking control last month."

The ratings are down. The reviews are lousy. But CBS says it's sticking with the anchor team of Dan Rather and Connie Chung."We are not second-guessing the decision. We are absolutely having no discussions about doing anything differently," says CBS News President Eric Ober.Well, maybe a few things."We are looking at format things to do. We have hardened up the broadcast. We have been more aggressive on breaking news coverage. I think you will probably be seeing Dan and Connie traveling more," Ober says.

Andrew Heyward might be the first network news executive to take over a show and predict that things are going to get worse under his tenure. But that's exactly what the new CBS News vice president is doing during his first week on the job as the new boss of "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung.""I think we're heading into some very tough times given the affiliate switches and clearance problem," Heyward said when asked about ratings for his newscast."There are some places where we're going into markets where there are literally no news department and the channel position is like almost triple digits.

In one breath, CBS anchorwoman Connie Chung says, "I'm having a difficult time, I really am. I haven't figured out yet what my routine should be. . . . I'm not complaining. But I don't know how I'm going to do all the work."In the next breath, Ms. Chung says that in addition to her other duties she is going to spend more time in Washington reporting stories for CBS News."I myself, want to contribute to the effort of breaking stories," she said. "Believe me, when there is so much news breaking out of Washington, I know it's a gold mine, and I still have some sources there.

Connie Chung will join Dan Rather as co-anchor of CBS' evening news starting June 1, the network announced yesterday.The debut of "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung" will make Ms. Chung, 46, only the second woman to anchor a network's nightly newscast. Barbara Walters co-anchored with Harry Reasoner at ABC News from 1976 to 1978.CBS News President Eric Ober denied the move was a ratings maneuver. However, CBS News is last among the three networks in attracting young viewers and female viewers.

CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News come to prime time tonight, and if you haven't been watching the broadcast the past six months or so, I urge you to take this opportunity to check Couric and her newscast out. Here's the cynical explanation as to why the evening news for the first time will be shown in prime time: Fox has American Idol scheduled in the same time slot, so what has CBS to lose by throwing Couric up against it? In fact, CBS will save money by not having to put an expensive entertainment show on only to see it clobbered in the ratings.

Next week, Katie Couric will celebrate her second anniversary as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Given the nature of that tenure, however, "celebrate" might not be quite the right word. "Can't win for losing," is the phrase Couric used to describe parts of the past two years in an interview last week. "It's been, quite candidly, pretty tough some of the time for me in my new job," she says. After a cosmic build-up in the summer of 2006 and a huge, first-night tune-in of about 13 million viewers to see the popular star of NBC's Today show assume the chair once held by Walter Cronkite, the wheels quickly started to come off Couric's new show.

Walter Cronkite, the most widely known and respected anchorman in network TV history, will be joining the Columbia-based Retirement Living TV channel on Tuesday as a weekly commentator. The 91-year-old journalist, who was anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News during its heyday from 1962 to 1981, will appear on videotape delivering editorial commentaries every Tuesday during the Daily Cafe, a two-hour noontime program anchored by former CNN newscasters Bobbie Battista and Felicia Taylor.

Longtime CBS anchorman Dan Rather is suing his former employer for $70 million, alleging the network breached his contract, tried to destroy his reputation and ran him off as a 60 Minutes correspondent during his final days at CBS. In the lawsuit filed yesterday in Manhattan, the 75-year-old Rather revisits the 2004 "Memogate" controversy that ended his 24-year career as anchorman of the CBS Evening News. (He left the anchor desk under a cloud of controversy in March 2005.) Memogate centered on Rather alleging on the basis of unverified documents that President Bush received preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard during his tour of duty at the time of the Vietnam War. CBS News was forced to retract the story and apologize for the charges that Rather made.

Keeping her charm in check, Katie Couric made her first foray overseas yesterday as anchor of the CBS Evening News, hosting the show from Amman, Jordan. President Bush was to have held a summit there with Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, but the meeting was unexpectedly postponed for a day, leaving Couric and her competitors at NBC and ABC scrambling to fill their broadcasts and Bush cooling his heels. The CBS anchor was plainly primed to deflate criticism that her performance has been overly chatty since she assumed the anchor position at CBS on Sept.

A feature on Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan reported in breathless tabloid fashion by correspondent Lara Logan. An essay by filmmaker Morgan Spurlock in which he decried the lack of civil discourse. The first televised pictures of Suri Cruise, child of actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. And anchorwoman Katie Couric showing lots of leg during a taped, sit-down interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. These offerings made up much of the first telecast of CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, which aired last night.

Just about midway through the past century, the guys who ran CBS decided to change the anchorman of the Evening News. Then as now, anchormen changes didn't happen with the flip of a coin, so there was a long debate about what to do. The bosses went through a long list of guys, but the news president at the time liked urbane Charles Collingwood, one of Edward R. Murrow's boys. The entertainment boss liked this slick, handsome, smart guy by the name of Mike Wallace or, if he wasn't available, a guy named Clete Roberts who was anchoring the local news in Los Angeles.

In his first television interview since leaving CBS News abruptly last month after working there for 44 years, Dan Rather said last night that he had not ruled out suing the network. "I can't say that I never thought about that," Rather told CNN's Larry King in a live broadcast in which he, nevertheless, made clear that he was moving on with his career and spent little time looking backward. But he conceded that the manner of his parting had been "painful." Rather, 74, announced June 20 that he was leaving the network after it became clear, he said, that CBS had no further use for him. His departure came 15 months after he stepped down as anchor of the CBS Evening News in the aftermath of a controversy over the authenticity of documents used in a story about President Bush's military career.

After what he called "a protracted struggle" with his bosses at CBS, veteran newsman Dan Rather said yesterday that he is leaving his professional home of 44 years. Although not a surprise, his decision, which comes 15 months after he stepped down as anchor of the CBS Evening News, prompted many in the media to chastise the network for mistreating one of the legends of television journalism. "It was handled poorly," said Fred Brown, co-chair of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee.

The deaths of two CBS crew members in Iraq and the wounding of a veteran correspondent have dealt yet another deadly blow to news organizations determined to cover a conflict increasingly perilous to journalists. For months, the killings and kidnappings of news professionals in Iraq have prompted a reappraisal of the need for large staffs there. While no major news organizations say they are planning to pull out of Iraq altogether, many smaller media outlets have left for good. At least 71 journalists have died in Iraq, more than in Vietnam -- a much longer conflict -- or World War II. Dozens have been kidnapped or wounded.