This ...Is CBS: A Chronicle of 60 Years

by Robert Slater

Chronicles the evolution of the controversial network from its birth in 1928, through its rise to prominence, to its slow decline, focusing on the luminaries who have figured in the rise and fall of CBS

354 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1988

About the author

Robert Slater was an American author and journalist known for over two dozen books, including biographies of political and business figures such as Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, George Soros, and Donald Trump.
Slater was born in Manhattan and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia High School in 1962 and graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, with a degree in political science. In 1967 he received a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics. He worked for United Press International (UPI) from 1969 to 1971 before moving to Jerusalem, where he worked for UPI until 1974; and for Time magazine in Jerusalem from 1976 to 1996. From 1987 and 1990 he was chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel. In his later years he was a columnist for The Jerusalem Report, and mentored young journalists at The Jerusalem Post. He lived for much of his life in Israel, and with his wife, Elinor, co-authored the books Great Jewish Women and Great Jewish Men.

Reviews

[Richard Tolleson · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you read "Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye" by Robert Metz, you can skip to the last couple of chapters of this book. I read the two back to back, and I'm not accusing Slater of plagiarism, but if my students turned in his book, I would definitely run passages of it through my "cheater checker, ". Many of the same anecdotes are told, in the same order. This book was written more than a decade after Metz's, so it updates with the departure of Cronkite, the hiring of Rather, the rise of Kuralt and Sunday Morning (but that's only mentioned briefly), and the corporate troubles CBS had with fending off takeovers, both real and imagined, friendly and -un. A lot has transpired since, and one gets the general sense that CBS is in a lot better shape both financially and organizationally than it was when this book was written. My three stars is for the fact that up until the mid 70's, when Metz's book ends, I didn't feel like I learned anything additional from this book. It's also repetitive, with Metz occasionally retelling a fact at the bottom of a page that he just told us at the top of the same page. If you are interested in broadcasting, and CBS in particular, this is worth a read, but don't expect it to inform on anything going on in the industry today. All of the things that the CBS employees were railing against in the 80's have come to pass, and, as the fictional Howard Beale said in the prescient film "Network", "We're in big trouble".