Mark Burnett, MGM’s TV chief, leaves amid Amazon reorganization
The media mogul has been with the company for 34 years and was involved in the early years of broadcast.
Media mogul and television icon Mark Burnett has left CBS Corp. as the studio’s television chief amid major changes in the company’s television division that could lead to the exit of iconic TV host Charlie Rose and several others in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The major shakeup at CBS Corp. follows the most recent departure of another of the company’s most well-known executives — Jeff Greenfield, a former chief executive of CNN, who joined a search firm in January.
CBS Corp. is searching for a leader who can replace Rose, who stepped down from his post as the network’s chief news anchor in January.
The company is also looking for a high-level replacement for Greenfield, who will leave at the end of June. The move follows CBS’ announcement that it is seeking to restructure its entire broadcast operations and lay off about 20 percent of its workforce.
The job of replacing Rose will be left to an internal search conducted by CBS president Leslie Moonves, the company said Monday.
The company already has been seeking to restructure the broadcast group with plans for a comprehensive sale of the company’s assets to help fund a potential sale of its stake in cable channels that would likely include its stake in Showtime.
Greenfield, who succeeded Rose after 15 years as CBS chief executive, was expected to report directly to Moonves, who has remained the president of CBS News. CBS Corp. is in the process of spinning off the news division into a separate company called CBS Interactive.
The shakeup at CBS Corp. comes four years after Moonves, who started his CBS news career at the network’s fledgling affiliate station in Dallas, stepped down from the top job at the company after 15 years running the company but kept the title of chief executive.
That transition signaled the beginning of a change at CBS Corp. that has had the studio and cable network divisions at the expense of the television side.
Burnett had taken the reins of CBS Corp. as it began developing a potential streaming service that the company had envisioned as a way to lure more subscribers to cable networks CBS could not own a stake in like Showtime. CBS later dropped plans for such a service as it struggled
