Greenfield, 63, will report for the struggling Evening News, among other broadcasts. The dollar value of his two-year contract "is between me and the IRS." (We love it when you're butch, Greenie.)
Greenfield has a huge comfort zone at CBS, where he served as media commentator for Sunday Morning from '79 to '83.
He's worked twice before for new Evening News boss Rick Kaplan. The big guy recruited Greenfield to CNN in '98 as senior news analyst. And Kaplan was executive producer of ABC's Nightline when Greenfield was its political and media analyst for 14 years, until '97.
"Rick and I vibrate sympathetically, like tuning forks," Greenfield says. "We see the news the same."
Greenfield's CNN deal expired early last month. His last appearance was Sunday on Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition. The network "made me a perfectly fine offer to stay," he says, but he'd been looking to get out a year ago.
Though some say Greenfield's exit was about lack of face time, he denies it. After almost a decade in the 24/7 cha-cha of cable news, he was jonesing to do longer pieces "with a little bit of twinkle."
"The irony is that I thought I would do it here" at CNN, he adds. "The nature of cable news is 'What's next? What's next?' Kaplan gets it. By definition, it's very hard to get folks to focus on longer-range stuff."
Short-range, Evening News continues to be locked in third place under Couric.
CBS didn't hire Greenfield "to fix or change the Evening News," he says. Still, he doesn't deny it needs fixing. Kaplan's hiring "tells you they have a hard job."
Couric may have the hardest job of all. Criticized for being too soft, she was accused of being too tough on Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards and his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, in their 60 Minutes interview last week.
