Ernest Leiser
Multiple Emmy winner
Philadelphia native and U. of Chi grad served in the Army during WWII, was a correspondent for Stars & Stripes and after the war reported from Europe for Collier's magazine and the Overseas News Agency. During his 29-year career, he reported mostly from Europe, where he was jailed briefly by communists while covering the revolt in Hungary in 1956, where he was the only reporter to obtain film coverage of the uprising.
After Leiser's considerable stint at CBS, news division prexy Richard Salant put him in charge of spearheading the division's emphasis on TV news, and he was eventually made director of television news at CBS. Rather credits him as "almost single-handedly" bringing CBS News from radio to TV.
He is further credited with proposing and championing the expansion of the evening newscast to 30 minutes from 15; the other networks soon followed.
In 1964, he was named director of the news division, where he hired Rather, and later he became executive producer of the "CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite."
It was Leiser who reportedly urged Cronkite to travel to Vietnam during the Tet offensive in 1968, and accompanied him; Cronkite's subsequent influential public assessment of the war as a "stalemate" helped clinch President Lyndon Johnson's decision to not seek re-election.
Leiser left CBS to become an executive producer at ABC News in 1972 but returned in 1975 to head the CBS News department covering political conventions and elections.
He won Emmys for three consecutive years, producing features on such subjects as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and life in the Vietnam War's Charlie Company infantry unit.
After retiring in 1985, he wrote articles warning that the quality of network news was in decline. During 1987-88, he served as a senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia U.
He is survived by wife Caroline Camp Leiser, two daughters and two grandchildren. A son died in 1992.
