Former CBS President Fred Friendly dies

March 4, 1998
Web posted at: 10:58 a.m. EST (1558 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Fred Friendly, the pioneering television producer and onetime president of CBS News, has died at 82 after suffering a series of strokes.

A spokesman for CBS News said Friendly died Tuesday evening.

From 1959 to 1964 Friendly was executive producer of "CBS Reports," putting out landmark programs like "Harvest of Shame," "Biography of a Bookie Joint" and "The Population Explosion."

He became president of CBS News in March 1964. He resigned abruptly on February 15, 1966, when the network broadcast an "I Love Lucy" rerun while rival NBC went live with a Senate hearing on Vietnam.

Friendly later wrote, "I must confess that in my almost two years as the head of CBS News I tempered my news judgment and tailored my conscience more than once. Perhaps it was this, as much as the dispute over the Vietnam hearings, that prompted me to get out while I still could."

He also reflected: "Because television can make so much money doing its worst, it often cannot afford to do its best."

'See It Now'

Whether producing landmark programs like "See It Now" with Edward R. Murrow or seminars for public television, Friendly was forever pushing himself and those around him to aim higher.

Part showman, part salesman, Friendly was a major influence in the development of television documentaries. He found ways to present serious issues without putting viewers to sleep. Over the years, he won 10 Peabody awards.

After leaving CBS, he became a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was the Ford Foundation's adviser on communications for 14 years, and created the Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society, a public television series that tackled a wide variety of issues.

"Fred is an original," PBS journalist Bill Moyers said in 1992. "Everything Fred has done has been unique. ... He never thinks that because something is serious it has to be dull."

CBS News commentator Andy Rooney said the Columbia seminars "were always entertaining and filled with the kind of meaty ideas no one else was serving to a television audience."

'Can be irritatingly persistent'

Rooney noted affectionately that Friendly "can be irritatingly persistent about any cause he espouses, annoying in private and rude in public, and on the slightest provocation, or none at all, he will whip out the Constitution and read it to anyone he happens to be talking to."

In addition to his television endeavors, Friendly published numerous articles and five books, including "The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and The First Amendment" and "Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control," an account of his 16 years at CBS.

He was quick to speak when anyone violated what he considered the principles of his profession. Television news, he once said, was in danger of being "twisted into an electronic carnival, in which show-biz wizardry and values obscure the line between entertainment and news."

He was born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer on October 30, 1915, in New York City.

A childhood fascination with history and radio led him to apply for work at a Providence, Rhode Island, radio station, WEAN, after graduation from business college there. He proposed doing a series of five-minute biographies called "Footprints in the Sands of Time."

Started at $8 a script

The station bought the idea, hired him to write and narrate them at $8 a script -- but also decided to shorten his name for broadcast purposes to Fred Friendly. He later adopted the name change legally.

During World War II he served with the information and education section in the Army.

In 1948 he met Murrow and they began to collaborate, first on the best-selling "I Can Hear It Now" album for Columbia Records -- an oral history of the years 1932 to 1945 -- then on a CBS radio network series, "Hear It Now."

They took the format to television with "See It Now." Its initial prime-time broadcast November 18, 1951, was the first coast-to-coast TV hookup. The award-winning series, which ran seven years, included Murrow's classic examination of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt.

When Friendly quit CBS, he said it was a matter of principle. Others said he had worn out his welcome with his tough, driven style. In "The Powers That Be," author David Halberstam described Friendly as "a man who always came equipped with his own precipice from which to jump."

The resignation opened the way for his later work in academia and in public television. The televised Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society brought jurists, journalists, government officials and others together to discuss on everything from libel to health care, terrorism to the Constitution.

Walter Cronkite declared them "an absolutely splendid use of television to inform and educate in a format that is at the same time delightfully entertaining and intellectually challenging."

Friendly said their purpose was "to open minds and to make the agony of decision-making so intense that you can escape only by thinking." But he cited the minority training program as his proudest achievement.

"We trained hundreds of minority journalists," he said. "One was a postman from Denver, another was Geraldo Rivera -- well, I'm not happy about him, but you take them as you find them."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related sites:

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• CBS
  • CBS News
• A Tribute to Fred Friendly - 1997 Press Freedom Awards
• Friendly enters TV Hall of Fame - Columbia University Record
• The Fred Friendly Seminars - PBS Online

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