Out of Focus

By any financial standard, CBS is the top network. It has posted record earnings for 17 consecutive quarters and, according to a Television Digest report released last week, its 1974 pretax profits ($110 million) were almost double those of its two competitors combined. Chairman William Paley, 73, who has run the network for almost 50 years, should feel a bit cheery. But Paley is fretful these days. He is upset by, of all things, a book, and a bad one at that.

CBS, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye is an unauthorized history of his communications empire. Written by New York Times Financial Columnist Robert Metz, it begins with the takeover of the small new network by the 27-year-old Paley, who arrived in New York from Philadelphia in 1928, bolstered by his father's cigar-manufacturing fortune. The book then meanders repetitiously through the company's long but successful drive to overtake giant NBC. Among Metz's claims:

> Jack Benny, who switched from NBC to CBS in1948, drawing much of NBC'S top talent with him, was rewarded in 1963 by a two-word dismissal. "You're through," said James Aubrey, then head of CBS programming.

> CBS's role in combatting the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the '50s was far less noble than it has been portrayed. The network followed the political blacklist in its hiring. Paley was never behind Edward R. Murrow's famous documentary series See It Now, and Murrow and Co-Producer Fred Friendly spent their own money to advertise it. Paley eventually killed the show, saying: "I don't want this constant stomachache every time you do a controversial subject."

> In the early '60s Paley became envious of the growing prestige of his No. 2 man, President Frank Stanton. Though Paley had long led Stanton to believe that he would become chairman when Paley retired in 1966, he reneged and decided to stay on. The two men distrusted each other thereafter until Stanton's retirement in 1973.

> Paley is now disenchanted with his new president, Arthur Taylor, 40, as well, and he is looking for another successor.

> In attempting to become a conglomerate, CBS has made some onerous acquisitions. To compete with RCA, it bought Hytron, a manufacturer of inferior TV sets, and finally abandoned it at a loss of $50 million. Shortly after CBS bought the New York Yankees in 1964, the glamorous team became a second-division bore. It was sold in 1973.

> Arrogant and aloof, Paley is an absentee executive who vacations sometimes for months with his exquisite wife Barbara ("Babe"). As a result, CBS is "rudderless," without any real sense of direction.

The first reaction at CBS was a judicious silence. The second was to point out the errors, which Kidder Meade, vice president of corporate affairs, did in a five-page letter to the publisher, Playboy Press. Paley then elaborated with a personal list of 35 grievances.

Some complaints are trivial; others are more important. Two of Metz's assertions concerning Paley's performance and character, however, seem to have particularly enraged him: that he does not pay enough attention to CBS and that he harbors ambivalent feelings about his Russian Jewish origins. "It makes me boil to be considered 'an absentee landlord,' " Paley retorted. "Few people have been closer and more intimately involved in the growth and progress of a company than I have." Paley also insists that he has pride in his heritage and has supported Jewish causes since his youth.

Strewn Cliches. Without all the publicity CBS has given it, the book might just have disappeared. Given a fascinating subject, Metz has produced a dull and amateurish chronicle. Cliches are strewn generously across every page, like bread crumbs, to guide the illiterate. Metz's people live "high on the hog," have an "appreciation for feminine pulchritude," give it "the old college try," and "turn a nice dollar" from a "pretty penny." Preparing for their "swan song," they, of course, do things differently in "this day and age" from what they did in "days of yore."

Metz says nothing much about the way CBS handles the news and nothing at all about a program format that emphasizes violence. Crime shows, Metz admits, bore him, and he could not be bothered to watch them. It seems, in fact, that he has seen very little television. There is no general discussion at all of what the network sends out over the airwaves and only occasional reflections on its quality. CBS deserves a more insightful, more searching and more intelligently critical biography--and so does the reader.

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