The development of the CBS news guidelines during the salant years

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Abstract
This manuscript draws on primary and secondary sources to track the evolution of the CBS News Standards, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. It examines some of the most difficult issues faced by CBS News President Richard S. Salant and other CBS managers as they attempted to delineate public interest standards for the network's journalists. Toward this end, CBS issued a comprehensive and detailed book of news guidelines in 1976. Those idealistic standards were designed to guide the network's news workers as well as to quell CBS's harshest external critics during a particularly tumultuous period in U.S. history. Efforts to compile and publicly release such a comprehensive set of news guidelines also reflected CBS management's willingness to subject news practices to external scrutiny.