Reprinted from Electronic Media, September 27, 1999, as seen in NewsPro.
September 27, 1999
Richard Leibner has represented TV’s best for 35 years.
By: Jon Lafayette
A wise man once said that in TV news, the talent agent sits between the egos and the idiots. And that’s where Richard Leibner has thrived. His firm, N.S. Bienstock earns about $8 million a year representing a who’s who of anchors, correspondents and producers.
Once upon a time, Mr. Leibner was an accountant, who was asked to run Nate Bienstock’s insurance agency. Mr. Leibner’s father was John Steinbeck’s accountant, and the author was a Bienstock client. In addition to selling policies to the literary set, Mr. Bienstock did other things for his clients, including negotiating contracts for correspondents in the early days of TV.
It was a business Mr. Leibner took to and 35 years later, he’s one of the most powerful figures in the industry. He was in the middle when Dan Rather replaced Walter Cronkite at CBS, and he escorted Diane Sawyer and others from CBS to ABC, which helped establish Roone Arledge’s credibility in news.
Bienstock, headed by Mr. Leibner and his wife Carole, has grown to a powerhouse with 26 staffers, including their sons Adam and Jonathan. And in the past few months, it has been in the middle of several big deals.
The agency secured a rich contract for Chris Matthews from NBC, which paid dearly for nearly fumbling him to a cable rival.
It sent Jack Ford from NBC to ABC, where he will anchor a night of "20/20" and is in line to anchor "Good Morning America," replacing another Bienstock client, Kevin Newman.
And in the glass slipper sweepstakes, Bienstock client Jane Clayson won the morning anchor seat at CBS next to Bryant Gumble.
The Coup was all the more remarkable because somehow Bienstock got Ms. Clayson to CBS despite ABC’s contractual ability to match her salary.
In an interview with ELECTRONIC MEDIA, Mr. Leibner doesn’t give away all his secrets. But he talks about the state of TV news from his unique vantage point.
An edited transcript of that interview follows:
EM: So how did you get Jane Clayson away from ABC and get her on "The Early Show" on CBS?
Mr. Leibner: We knew we had a candidate that the executive producer and Bryant Gumble were very high on—and that [CBS Television President and CEO] Les Moonves thought was excellent and Andrew [Heyward, president of CBS News] thought was excellent. So it was a question of persevering and gaining freedom, and Houdini doesn’t tell his secrets.
EM: Could any agent have done that?
Mr. Leibner: Can anybody do that? Yes. Why do we do it more than anyone else? The answer’s got to be we’re respected. We can get to people. And we’ve obviously been pretty good and selective about who we’ve chosen as clients in that we’ve got so many of the good people. The proof is in the pudding. How many thousands of deals have we done in 35 years? Knowledge is power, and experience is everything. And you’ve got to have a little luck with timing. In the end, they make the decision, but you can sure as hell try to influence it.
EM: Wouldn’t good people get those jobs without you?
Mr. Leibner: I’ve always said that many agents overhype what they bring to the ball game. But you have an ability to have access and get people looked at because people trust your taste and judgment. And there’s the amount of TV news we watch, so management knows we’re interested in their product.
I think it’s a combination of everybody’s effort. I do think that there is a Bienstock advantage. Otherwise I don’t think you can compete against the major agencies and all the people who have come at us—there must be 35 or 40 people doing this now. I think our longevity is based on a well-earned respect and reputation in the business with management and with clients.
I think it’s borne out by the number of people who’ve climbed high places while they’ve been agency clients. Dan was a client when he was in the Dallas bureau; Diane was a client when she was No. 2 in the state department at CBS. There are dozens of those situations where we have moved our people along. You’d need four pages to list them all.
EM: Can you do anything to help your clients when the network or station can’t keep a newscast from going off the rails?
If you watch television, and you’re just not into representing people for cosmetics or for drawing up a contract but you really have a love of it, then you can get on the phone with management and say, "Did you see the piece that Arnold Diaz did last night or [John] Stossel did last night?" You talk about specific pieces and you tell them why you think something was good or something was bad.
EM: Can you keep your clients from going down with the ship?
Mr. Leibner: Sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t. And if the person’s been a good contributor to the show then there’s a way to find them their next role. If that person has contributed to the awfulness of the show, then sometimes you can’t save them. The reality is even if something isn’t going well, you’ve go to get the person you represent to do the best they can to be a good contributor to it so that they’re not branded with the failure.
EM: Like the "Good Morning America" situation?
Mr. Leibner: Kevin Newman is a fine young journalist, and ABC has faith in him and [understands] how difficult the situation was at the point in time that they had to stop a free fall and put Diane [Sawyer] and Charlie [Gibson] back on.
He’s now done a number of fabulous pieces for "Nightline," and he anchored over two weeks of [Peter] Jennings’ ["World News Tonight"] this summer, so they know that he wasn’t the reason that didn’t work—that it was a set of circumstances and timing.
Paula Zahn did a fabulous job in the morning at CBS for years, but inevitably those shows change casts. She had the option of a number of job choices and immediately made a difference at Fox. So cream always rises back to the top, even if it gets shook up once in a while.
EM: How important is getting tricky clauses put in contracts, like windows that let you take another job before the deal expires?
Mr. Leibner: A lot of those concepts are things that we created and have become commonplace expressions. I’ll never forget that after Diane left, David Burke [former president of CBS News] called me up and said from now on Mr. Tisch will have ceilings and floors but no windows. You come up with creative ideas. You try to find different ways of dealing with things.
EM: What role have you had in the explosive growth of anchor salaries?
Mr. Leibner: Historically, Bienstock has been significant in helping to set the wage levels in the business from the ‘70s forward. And everything is cyclical. Somehow, network billings and advertising rates continue to go up 10 percent a year even though audiences get smaller and in the long run salaries continue to grow. Sometimes, the number of jobs will shrink periodically. When somebody wants somebody, you can forget about budgets.
EM: At a time of budget cutbacks, is too much money going to anchors?
Mr. Leibner: During the Tisch era at CBS, Dan Rather once offered to take a pay cut to save jobs. Dan and I separately went to see the president of the network, and he said don’t ever bring that up again because those jobs may appear to be saved for a brief period of time, [but] they’ll still go away. And no matter what people want to say about blaming anchors for getting too much, other people’s salaries have always moved up as anchor salaries have moved up.
EM: How responsible are anchors for a newscast’s success?
Mr. Leibner: If you’re ever privy to seeing Q scores, then you will see how successful news shows will be fronted by personable, reachable people with credibility. Whether it’s at the network or big-market or middle-market level, you will find a correlation between the Q scores of the anchors and the top reporters and the beat reporters and the success of their station.
EM: Big companies are swallowing up the networks. Do they seem to care about news?
Mr. Leibner: Unfortunately, whether it was baseball teams or broadcast networks, you used to have barons of business, like O’Mally and the Dodgers. In broadcasting, you had Sarnoff and Paley and Goldenson and so for them and in their social circles and in their personal responsibilities, the news was important. But I don’t think it’s going away, as other naysayers have said.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily good that we’re going to have four monster corporations for taste and culture, but I think as you get a handful of dominant companies and they look at the importance of news to their reputation and their stature and their cost relative to their overall profits….
I’m hopeful that down the road when these companies successfully operate that their budgets will expand again in these areas.
EM: Do you sense change in job satisfaction of people in TV news?
Mr. Leibner: I think a lot of those complaints go back some in time. I don’t think the implication of certain people that electronic journalism has gone all bad is fair at all. There used to be 15 minutes of national news in the evening in black and white. I’m not saying that everything is wonderful. I’m saying that people have to work with fewer resources and a corporate reality that exists.
But the inference that corporations are irresponsible or don’t care or that the public isn’t being served doesn’t ring true when there are three 24-hour news channels and the others still recognize the importance of having a key anchorman at each network and a key prime-time newsmagazine and other stuff.
"Reel advice: Highlight local"
By: Jon Lafayette
Electronic Media, 9/27/99.
Richard Leibner offers this tip to reporters putting their reels together:
" Inevitably, everybody gets sent out of town on some big national story. For the next three months, the lead piece on everybody’s tape is John Kennedy’s funeral or Three Mile Island or TWA 800. That’s not the lead piece you want to put on your reel because you’re then competing with the four best people at network television. So you got sent out of town? Hooray, hooray. So you’re the best reporter in your shop. La-dee-da.
"What you want on your tape is the mundane local story, whether it’s an ethnic parade or a fire or another gyp artist but where you tell a story differently than it’s told 15 times a week in every city in the country. You want to open your tape with a live news stand-up that shows you can walk, talk and think on your feet.
"You want your first piece to be over before the news director realizes he’s looking at the second piece, and you want the second piece to be another reasonable length hard news story, because if you get the person to the third piece, then it can be longer and then it can be gripping. So often tapes come in and ego governs the order of pieces on the tape."
By Jon Lafayette
Electronic Media 9/27/99
Carole Cooper remembers when her husband was Richard Leibner, CPA.
"Richard’s not an accountant’s personality," she says in a notable understatement. "He was not happy with what he was doing."
After Mr. Leibner bought Nate Bienstock’s insurance agency and wanted to expand its business to representing news talent in 1974, he asked Ms. Cooper, who’d been producing TV commercials, to join him at the office as well.
"The hardest thing was whether we could work together, but here we are a lot of years later."
She’s become Bienstock’s secret weapon, quietly effective while Mr. Leibner is the brash public figure.
"I think we bring different things to the agency," said Ms., Cooper. "There are some people who only want Richard. He’s so well-known; he represents so many stars. There are other people who don’t want Richard because he’s so big and well-known and represents so many stars. They want someone more low key. And I represent a lot of women who are more comfortable with a woman."
She recalled getting a call from Vicky Mabrey, who’d just been offered a slot on CBS’s new "60 Minutes II."
"We had never met," Ms. Cooper said, but she was having a tough time as a woman with less experience than most "60 Minutes" correspondents getting a contract she thought was fair. "She was prepared to turn down the job. If you have a client who shows a willingness to turn down a job, you have a lot of leverage." And the deal got done.
Often, Bienstock clients replace other Bienstock clients.
Jack Ford is now in line to become anchor of "Good Morning America," a job previously held by another Bienstock client, Kevin Newman, who wasn’t as experienced an anchor as Mr. Ford.
Ms. Cooper said that had Mr. Ford not been under contract to NBC a year ago, he probably would have gotten the "GMA" job then.
Kevin became a candidate because Jack wasn’t available," she said.
Similarly, the agency had several candidates for the CBS morning show job, previously held by Ms. Cooper’s client Jane Robelot.
"It’s all about telling the truth," Ms. Cooper said. "There was no way in the world that I was going to be able to save that job. Not because it was Jane’s fault, the show was not successful. Sometimes you go down with the ship."
Ms. Cooper represents Thalia Assuras, but the job went to Jane Clayson, represented by Peter Goldberg, another Bienstock agent.
"We put up anybody we feel is right for a job," she said. "But if a client get a lead on a job that none one the agents has heard of, then that’s the only person submitted," Mr. Leibner added.
In addition to on-air talent, Bienstock has been representing more producers, including the executive producers of about a dozen syndicated talk and reality shows.
Naturally, producer salaries are rising.
"Agents escalate salaries—there’s no question about it," Ms. Cooper said. "If there weren’t agents, people would not be getting what they’re being paid now. But again, you have to be good. You can have a good agent, but if you’re not good, you’re not going to last."