At least one person at CBS has been having a good time lately. He's David Letterman, the late-night host who came to the network in August 1993 with only one regret: in leaving his past employer, No. 3-rated NBC, he was giving up the best butt of a joke a comedian could ask for. So as CBS's fortunes have fallen precipitously in recent months, Letterman's wisecracks have grown sharper. Last Thursday he talked about the woman in France who celebrated her 120th birthday. She's so old, Letterman cracked, "she can remember when CBS was No. 1."
But the biggest piece of network news last week hit Letterman a little closer to home. CBS Broadcast Group president Howard Stringer, who personally led the campaign to lure Letterman away from NBC, announced his resignation to head up a media venture by three telephone companies-NYNEX, Bell Atlantic and Pacific Telesis. The companies plan to offer an array of programming and interactive-video services to be fed into homes via telephone lines. "The opportunity was more exciting than anything else I was likely to be offered at the ripe old age of 53," said Stringer. Letterman, for his part, confessed befuddlement at the new venture-"You pick up your phone, you get a movie and a pizza"-but offered a heartfelt tribute to Stringer: "He made coming to CBS seem like a really classy move."
Over the past year, CBS has suffered perhaps the worst run of bad fortune in any network's history. First, the Fox network outbid CBS for the rights to N.F.L. broadcasts, removing pro football from CBS's Sunday schedule for the first time since the 1950s. CBS also bore the brunt of Rupert Murdoch's raid on affiliates last May, when 12 major-market stations (eight of them aligned with CBS) switched their affiliations to Fox. As hits like Murder, She Wrote and Murphy Brown have grown older and no new ones have emerged to take their place, CBS's prime-time ratings have plummeted; after three straight years as No. 1, the network has dropped to third place so far this season and in the important 18-to-49 age group could even wind up fourth (behind Fox). Furthermore, a malaise seems to have settled over the network, amid widespread expectation that chairman Laurence Tisch is getting ready to sell it.
Stringer, a personable, Oxford-educated Welshman who moved up through the ranks at CBS News before landing the top corporate job in 1988, insists that his departure was not sparked by CBS's recent troubles or by any antagonism between him and his boss. "Larry Tisch has been very good to me, on a personal and a professional level," Stringer told Time. But he acknowledged that the collapse of mogul Barry Diller's attempt to take over CBS last summer-a bid that Stringer, by all accounts, strongly supported-"gave a sense of uncertainty to my future."