AfterWords

The Anchors’ Man

Richard Leibner ’59 put himself at the top of the industry when it comes to finding TV talent. By Jeffrey Jones

Like many of us, Richard Leibner ’59 turns on the news soon after waking up each morning. But unlike even the most avid newshound, Leibner flips on three television sets in the bedroom of his New York City apartment, where he keeps an early morning eye on some of the hundreds of broadcast professionals whose jobs and salaries he’s negotiated.

Tapped for the second straight year as one of the “10 Most Powerful in TV News” by Television Week magazine, Leibner, the head of the high-powered New York talent agency N.S. Bienstock, lives and breathes TV news.

“When I started, local evening newscasts were a half hour and Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were 15 minutes, in black and white,” Leibner recalls of his nearly 40-year career. “I was in the right place at the right time when the business began to explode.”

One of several guest speakers at Meliora Weekend last October, Leibner received the Meliora Citation for Career Achievement, the University’s most prestigious alumni award for professional excellence.

While Bienstock is not the only agency in the profession that represents TV and radio anchors, correspondents, and producers, Leibner’s dominance has made his name almost synonymous with the occupation.

His company’s clients include household names like Rather, Safer, O’Reilly, and Zahn, newer stars like Aaron Brown and Chris Matthews, and newsies at local stations around the country. The staff of 30 includes his wife and partner, Carole Cooper, and his sons, Adam and Jonathan.

A master of persuasion, Leibner is known for his business acumen and drive. But he’s also a person of singular charm. Although he makes and receives up to 60 phone calls daily, he has a knack for making those on the other end of the line feel like the most important person he’s spoken with all day.

As one writer put it: “Leibner with a phone is like Mantle with a bat, Child with a spatula, Perlman with a bow.”

Being a broadcast agent is a vocation Leibner virtually created on his own a few years after graduating from Rochester at the age of 20. Son of an accountant, he took an auditing job and then served a hitch in the Army Reserve. When his father’s health faltered, Leibner joined the small family firm.

One of his father’s associates was an insurance agent named Nat Bienstock, whose clients included the now legendary CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid and a handful of other broadcast journalists. On the side, Bienstock helped negotiate their employment contracts.

When Bienstock took a medical leave, Leibner filled in. “And I became a news junkie,” he recalls.

The Leibners eventually acquired Bienstock’s business, and Richard launched himself as an agent.

In 1980, Leibner supercharged the industry and his own career when he slipped his client Dan Rather into the anchor chair of the retiring Walter Cronkite with a dazzling 10-year, $22 million contract. Leibner recalls the negotiation with a poker player’s sangfroid: “You strategically played your cards until the hand played out.”

Over the years, Leibner has seen the simon-pure luster of broadcast news fade.

“The success of 60 Minutes as a cash cow changed attitudes toward news as something you do for prestige and public spirit,” says Leibner. “Dick Salant (former president of CBS News) used to ask at the morning meeting, ‘What does the public need to know?’ Now it’s become more ‘What does the public want to know?’”

Leibner, who has endowed a scholarship that’s earmarked for students who graduate from public high school in Brooklyn, says his Rochester years were “an invaluable experience.”

Among the highlights was being a debater with the forensic society: “It really taught me how to use my mouth.”
Is he thinking of retirement?

“No,” says Leibner, after pondering the idea for a millisecond. “It’s too exciting, too much at the center of things.”

That’s clearly where he enjoys being.

1959

In an occupation known for toughness and shrewdness, Leibner’s secret weapon is his natural ebullience.

“Rich is one of the most energetic and enthusiastic people you will ever encounter,” says Robert Witmer ’59, a senior partner at the Rochester law firm of Nixon Peabody and chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees.

Witmer, who played basketball as a Yellowjacket, got to know Leibner as a cheerleader. “He is wonderfully gregarious, a lot of fun to be around.”

Jeffrey Jones is a Rochester-based freelancer.