Salant, CBS, And The Battle For The Soul Of Broadcast Journalism

Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism tells the story of CBS News during its golden era. The late Richard S. Salant was president of CBS News for sixteen years throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He became widely recognized by journalists as the “patron saint of television news.” During his tenure, Salant confronted issues of enormous importance – Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and Watergate – and launched the first thirty-minute E vening News, CBS Morning News , and 60 Minutes . Along the way, he hired Mike Wallace, Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, and Diane Sawyer. This first-person account, compiled and edited by Susan and Bill Buzenberg during the years since Salant’s death in 1993, is an important part of the history of broadcast journalism, an inside story of the politicians and journalists who shaped our recent history, and an eloquent alarm about the current erosion of broadcast journalism standards.