Richard Leibner, the prominent talent agent who transformed the TV news business by guiding the careers of such renowned broadcast journalists as Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and Norah O’Donnell, has died. He was 85.
Leibner died Tuesday at his home in New York, UTA vice chairman Jay Sures announced. The agent started out in the 1960s at New York-based N.S. Bienstock, which was acquired in 2014 by UTA.
Leibner also 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 before he retired in December 2021 after 58 years in the business.
“Decades ago, he made it his personal mission to see that big name news stars should be treated and compensated like traditional movie and television stars,” Sures told staffers in a memo obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.
Born in Brooklyn, Leibner graduated from the University of Rochester and New York University before joining his father’s New York City accounting firm in 1964.
Leibner and his dad eventually joined forces with Nathan Bienstock, whose clients included CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid and author John Steinbeck. As more journalists shifted to television in the 1960s and became known for covering the Vietnam War and civil rights movement, Bienstock handled contracts for them.
“When I started, local evening newscasts were a half-hour and Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were 15 minutes, in black and white,” Leibner said in a 2004 interview. “I was in the right place at the right time when the business began to explode.”
The Leibners eventually acquired Bienstock’s firm, and Richard began as an agent. By the end of the 1970s, he would represent many of the journalists on CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Leibner helped Rather succeed Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1981 with a record-setting contract that paid $2.2 million a year, and he engineered Sawyer’s move from CBS to ABC News in 1989.
He was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame in 2018.
Survivors include his wife, Carole Cooper, who joined Bienstock in 1976 and still works at UTA — her clients have included Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Anderson Cooper — and their sons, Adam (a UTA TV Broadcast partner) and Jonathan.
Funeral services are to be announced.
“What concerns me is the fact that cable news is opinionated at night and we get a non-politician who becomes president for four years and makes it a religion to attack journalism,” Leibner told the Los Angeles Times when he retired. “This game of everybody worried about their ratings and attacking each other is doing nobody any good.”
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