Richard Leibner, a powerful agent whose firm brokered contracts for many of the biggest names in television news, including Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Anderson Cooper, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer and Steve Kroft, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
His son Jonathan said the cause was kidney cancer.
Mr. Leibner’s firm, N.S. Bienstock — named for one of its founders, Nathan Bienstock — represented hundreds of anchors, reporters, producers and others in network and local television news.
The negotiation that grabbed the biggest headlines was for Mr. Rather, then one of the star correspondents of the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”
Between late 1979 and early 1980, Mr. Leibner (pronounced LEEB-ner) parlayed interest in Mr. Rather as the evening anchor from all three network news divisions: ABC News, whose president, Roone Arledge, was trying to raise his third-place division’s profile; NBC News, where the evening anchor John Chancellor was hoping to change to a commentary role; and CBS News, where Walter Cronkite had been the evening anchor since 1962.
“The Rather situation was tough and sensitive because CBS News knew something had to happen after Cronkite,” Mr. Leibner told Manhattan, inc. magazine in 1986. “Cronkite had told them, contrary to what anybody had ever inferred, that he wanted off. He was tired of it.”
Mr. Leibner surprised Mr. Rather by telling him that he thought it was possible to get him as much as $6 million over five years. In the end, CBS agreed to pay him what has been variously reported as $2.2 million a year and $8 million (about $29 million in today’s money) over five years. He succeeded Mr. Cronkite on the “CBS Evening News” in early 1981.
Roger Mudd, who had been viewed as Mr. Cronkite’s heir apparent, resigned after Mr. Rather got the job and moved to NBC News.
In early 1989, Mr. Leibner orchestrated Ms. Sawyer’s high-profile departure from “60 Minutes” to ABC News, for a reported $1.6 million annual salary, to host a new program, “Prime Time Live,” with Sam Donaldson.
A trained accountant, Mr. Leibner was described in a 1989 profile by Ben Yagoda in The New York Times Magazine as an idiosyncratic character with a “remarkable emotional range.”
“He can be plaintive, cajoling, jocular, terse, profane, sentimental, jovial, respectful, dismissive, analytical or expansive: The one constant is the strain of his native Brooklyn in his voice,” Mr. Yagoda wrote.
He was also known for telling exceedingly dirty jokes.
Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News, said in a phone interview: “It would have been easy to dismiss him as a Damon Runyonesque showman, but when it came to actual negotiations, he’d come in, sit on the couch with a legal pad and pen, and we’d go through the details together. He was scrupulously detailed and honest.”
But if a client was involved in a crisis, Mr. Heyward said, Mr. Leibner would suggest that they meet at his office: “He’d say, ‘Come to the jukebox,’ and we’d have discussions near his 1950s jukebox. That was the place for a sensitive summit.”
Richard Allen Leibner was born on March 15, 1939, in Brooklyn. His father, Sol, was a certified public accountant. His mother, Eleanor (Zelon) Leibner, was a schoolteacher.
After graduating from the University of Rochester with a bachelor’s degree in business in 1959, Mr. Leibner earned a Master of Business Administration degree from New York University in 1963. By then, he was working as an accountant with his father, who had clients in the music publishing and record businesses.
In 1964, he, his father and Mr. Bienstock, an insurance salesman, started N.S. Bienstock. Mr. Bienstock had established a niche for himself by selling policies to broadcasters like Mr. Cronkite; he also negotiated contracts for some of his clients.
The Leibners eventually bought out Mr. Bienstock but kept the company name. The elder Mr. Leibner did accounting work for the firm’s clients but was not an agent. In 1975, Carole Cooper, who had married Richard Leibner in 1964, joined the firm.
Mr. Leibner recalled that early on he represented TV news correspondents and anchors, some of whom were renowned for covering the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, but who were not yet of interest to his larger competitors.
“The major agencies were all focused on movies and television and making the big money in package fees,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2022. “We were specialists, and that’s how we got the foothold and got ahead of everybody.”
He deftly exploited shifts within the broadcasting business, including ABC News’s willingness to pay heavily for the talent it needed to compete against CBS and NBC; the expansion of local news programs; and the birth and expansion of cable news.
Mr. Leibner negotiated the deal in 1979 that brought Daniel Schorr, the longtime CBS News correspondent, to Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, a year before it went on the air.
In 1983, Edward M. Joyce, the president of CBS News, angrily complained to Variety about what he described as Mr. Leibner’s interference in editorial and management decisions. At the time, Bienstock represented about 100 CBS News employees.
“I am determined not to let the flesh peddlers affect the caliber of our broadcasts,” Mr. Joyce said in an article with a subheadline that roared, “Sez There’s Too Much Jack in Bienstock.”
Five years later, in his memoir, “Prime Times Bad Times: A Personal Drama of Network Television,” Mr. Joyce admitted that it had been a blunder to use the term “flesh peddler” — which Mr. Leibner felt was antisemitic — but he still complained about Mr. Leibner’s attempts to “broker, even arbitrate, many of the decisions being made at CBS News.”
Mr. Leibner played down his influence at CBS.
“Excuse me,” he told The Times, “but are Carole and I more powerful than an organization with a book value of $5 billion?”
In 2001, one of Mr. Leibner’s clients, Paula Zahn, was fired by Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, after he learned that she had received an offer to leave Fox, where she was a prime-time host, for CNN.
Mr. Ailes accused Mr. Leibner of unethical behavior for negotiating a deal for Ms. Zahn to leave Fox months before her contact was to expire; he sued Mr. Leibner and Bienstock for breach of contract. A New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed the case in early 2002, and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court rejected Fox’s effort to reinstate the lawsuit a year later.
Bienstock was acquired by the United Talent Agency in 2014, but Mr. Leibner stayed until he retired in 2021.
In addition to his son Jonathan, a principal at the talent firm Fast Times Management, he is survived by his wife, an agent at U.T.A.; another son, Adam, who is a partner at U.T.A.; four granddaughters; and a brother, Jerry.
Mr. Leibner once said that some of his best hires were former network business executives.
“We brought in people who knew what everybody was making,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “We were able to build everybody’s salary base because we had more knowledge than anybody else.”
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