CBS’ David Burke: Viewers Too Content With Images, Slogans

CBS News President David Burke said Tuesday that he’s not comfortable with TV coverage of the presidential campaign or with the campaign itself. But he suggested that the public is part of the problem.

“The state of the political art is at a rather low level,” he said, referring to the campaigns. Yet, so is the demand from the electorate for something better, he contended.

CBS has considered specials on major issues that have gotten little discussion in the campaign, such as the federal deficit, Burke told a press conference of newspaper reporters who write about television.

“But I sort of sense an unwanting to know,” he added, asserting that the public instead is content with campaign images and symbols. “The public is buying the flag factories and the pledge of allegiance and card-carrying-this and card-carrying-that.”

If journalists are doing their job well, Burke said, Americans should pay attention to far more important matters, “but I sort of sense a political desire to (say) ‘I’m OK, Jack, pull up the ladder.’ . . .”

“I’m not blaming the public,” he later said. “But I do have a sense . . . that the demand level is low.”

Asked where he would fault television news in this situation, he replied: “I fault us for being members of the same public and not willing to . . . perhaps put on a hair shirt and say, ‘Look, sit down, I’m going to talk to you about the federal deficit.’ ”

A former top aide in the middle and late 1960s to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Burke joined CBS on Aug. 1 after 11 years as a senior executive at ABC News. He is the first outsider to head CBS News.

His appearance Tuesday was his first press conference since being hired to succeed Howard Stringer, now president of the CBS Broadcast Group, after several years of well-publicized turmoil, major layoffs and low morale at CBS News.

Burke, who has done virtually no interviews since taking office, said he is convinced that the news division’s morale and pride will be restored quickly.

During his hourlong press session, Burke declared his “extraordinarily strong” support for the third-in-ratings “CBS This Morning” and criticized the recent presidential debates as “contrivances.”

He praised as “absolutely the right decision,” anchorman Dan Rather’s refusal to participate as a panelist in last Thursday’s final presidential debate. (Rather said he didn’t think the debate procedures were good, and that he wanted to report the process, not be a participant in it.)

Burke also publicly reiterated what he privately told staffers when he took over at CBS News: He doesn’t want the division’s internal problems leaked to the press. Such leaks often occurred during the tenure of Stringer and his two immediate predecessors, Van Gordon Sauter and Ed Joyce.

“I’m serious about CBS News as an institution and how it conducts itself professionally,” Burke said. He said he has advised staffers that “if you’re interested in your career, you should take that into account.”

There’s no problem in discussing “substantive issues” with the press, he said. But when he took over, “the thing I did criticize was the practice . . . of people talking to the press for their own self-aggrandizement.”

He didn’t identify those people, but he said such talk “is debilitating to an institution and it’s terribly unfair to the vast majority” of people at CBS News who want to take pride in their work.

These people, he said, want to work “in an atmosphere that is conducive to bringing out their best talents and . . . not an atmosphere that is rumor-driven. I want to help that vast majority.”

Speaking of on-air matters, Burke emphasized his backing for “CBS This Morning,” which last November became the latest in CBS’ long, and still-unsuccessful, bid to compete in the morning-program ratings with NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“I’m interested in seeing it grow,” Burke said of the CBS program, and he would do “anything I can” to achieve that goal.

He also voiced support for CBS’ two young prime-time news magazines, “48 Hours” and “West 57th.” But he said the latter, airing Saturdays at 10 p.m., was a “ridiculous” time period, one that was “not the most propitious time” to expect an audience to tune in for a news program.

Without giving details, he also said it was his goal to make CBS News economically self-sufficient.

It is important nowadays, Burke said, that a network news organization be “economically sound . . . otherwise, you’re a supplicant. You’re not a full player in the corporate environment in which you work.”