Richard Leibner, the renowned skills agent who transformed the TV news replace by guiding the careers of such notorious broadcast journalists as Dan Reasonably, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and Norah O’Donnell, has died. He used to be 85.
Leibner died Tuesday at his home in Recent York, UTA vice president Jay Sures introduced. The agent began out within the 1960s at Recent York-primarily based N.S. Bienstock, which used to be acquired in 2014 by UTA.
Leibner additionally signed and represented the likes of Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Bob Simon, Steve Kroft, Bill Whitaker, Chuck Scarborough, Paula Zahn, Brian Stelter, Daniel Schorr and Fareed Zakaria prior to he retired in December 2021 after 58 years within the replace.
“Decades ago, he made it his deepest mission to acknowledge that enormous title news stars must soundless be treated and compensated luxuriate in worn movie and tv stars,” Sures told staffers in a memo got by The Hollywood Reporter.
Born in Brooklyn, Leibner graduated from the University of Rochester and Recent York University prior to becoming a member of his father’s Recent York City accounting firm in 1964.
Leibner and his dad within the close joined forces with Nathan Bienstock, whose purchasers integrated CBS Files commentator Eric Sevareid and author John Steinbeck. As more journalists shifted to television within the 1960s and have became diagnosed for covering the Vietnam War and civil rights accelerate, Bienstock handled contracts for them.
“After I started, native evening newscasts were a half of-hour and Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were quarter-hour, in gloomy and white,” Leibner said in a 2004 interview. “I was within the merely teach on the merely time when the replace began to explode.”
The Leibners within the close acquired Bienstock’s firm, and Richard began as an agent. By the pause of the 1970s, he would signify plenty of the journalists on CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Leibner helped Reasonably prevail Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening Files in 1981 with a file-environment contract that paid $2.2 million a year, and he engineered Sawyer’s pass from CBS to ABC Files in 1989.
He used to be inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Corridor of Reputation in 2018.
Survivors contain his indispensable other, Carole Cooper, who joined Bienstock in 1976 and soundless works at UTA — her purchasers have integrated Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Anderson Cooper — and their sons, Adam (a UTA TV Broadcast companion) and Jonathan.
Funeral companies and products are to be introduced.
“What concerns me is the truth that cable news is opinionated at evening and we gain a non-politician who turns into president for four years and makes it a religion to attack journalism,” Leibner told the Los Angeles Times when he retired. “This sport of all americans skittish about their rankings and attacking every diverse is doing nobody any appropriate.”