Current (https://current.org/tag/cbs/)
In the beginning, there was CBS Reports. Then came Bill Moyers. It was 1976. Executive Producer Howard Stringer wanted to show the world that the hour documentary was still viable despite the gaggle of magazine-style news shows pushing their way to the screen. Accountants had discovered there was profit in the magazine format and wise men in good-looking suits informed us we were behind the times.
Fred W. Friendly, the legendary CBS News producer who tried to bring innovation to public TV in the 1960s and later developed a celebrated series of televised seminars on major public policy issues, died March 3 at his home in New York City. He was 82. “He was a great broadcaster, a great innovator, a great friend of public television,” observed PBS President Ervin Duggan in a release. At CBS, Friendly worked for years with Edward R. Murrow, producing many of his appearances, including the milestone 1954 report that questioned Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign and the famous CBS Reports: “Harvest of Shame” on the lives of migrant workers, aired in 1960. He was named president of the news division in 1964 and quit two years later when the network carried an I Love Lucy rerun instead of a Senate hearing on the Vietnam war.