THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CBS NEWS GUIDELINES DURING THE SALANT YEARS

This manuscript draws on primary and secondary sources to track the ev olution oi the CBS News Standards, particularly during the 1960s and 1 970s. It examines some oi the most difficult issues laced by CBS News President Richard S. Salant and other CBS managers as they attempted t o delineate public interest standards for the network's journalists. T oward this end, CBS issued a comprehensive and detailed book of news g uidelines in 1976. Those idealistic standards were designed to guide t he network's news workers as well as to quell CBS's harshest external critics during a particularly tumultuous period in U.S. history. Effor ts to compile and publicly release such a comprehensive set of news gu idelines also reflected CBS management's willingness to subject news p ractices to external scrutiny.