Scott Pelley (AP)
HALF THE ANCHOR: CBS’s Scott Pelley’s (left) job could have been done by Anderson Cooper (right). (
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During the Katie Couric years, CBS “discussed” the idea of outsourcing the evening news to CNN to save money, according to the former No. 2 man at CBS News.
“It is no secret that at both ABC and CBS, corporate management has pushed news management to make deals with CNN that would get them out from under the very high costs and — in some years — the losses involved in maintaining the highly paid staffs and expensive facilities needed to produce the evening newscasts,” Paul Friedman, who was the top deputy to ex-CBS News President Sean McManus, writes in the Columbia Journalism Review.
CBS has been in merger talks with CNN on and off since at least 2008 — but the partnership never came off because CNN was non-union, making it “nearly impossible to share resources,” Friedman writes.
Then he drops the bombshell:
“One alternative that has been discussed is to get around the union barriers by licensing CNN to produce an evening newscast for a network, for a fee that would be less than what the network spends to maintain its own staff and facilities.”
A CBS News spokesperson yesterday denied that a CNN newscast was every under serious consideration.
“ ‘The CBS Evening News’ is the centerpiece of a revitalized CBS News, and no such action has been contemplated,” she said.
Friedman, too, admitted that the idea was not “palatable . . . in large part because no corporate boss looks forward to losing prestige and risking a public-relations beating,” he wrote.
Friedman had been the executive vice president of CBS News during the years when Couric anchored the evening newscast — though he never agreed with the decision to hire her from the “Today” show in 2006, according to insiders.
He was forced out in early 2011 — shortly before Couric left CBS — when his boss, McManus, went back to running the network’s sports operation.