CBS News Suspends Rooney for Remarks About Blacks : Race relations: The commentator is quoted by The Advocate, a gay magazine, but he denies making the statements.

NEW YORK —  “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney was suspended for three months without pay by CBS News on Thursday following remarks about blacks and gays attributed to him in The Advocate, a gay magazine based in Los Angeles.

“I have made it clear that CBS News cannot tolerate such remarks or anything that approximates such comments since they in no way reflect the views of this organization,” CBS News President David Burke said in a statement released after he met with Rooney.

Rooney categorically denied having made racist remarks, saying he was talking about problems with educating people of all races, not just blacks. However, he acknowledged having made derogatory comments about gays.

Burke said Rooney’s future with CBS News will be discussed at the end of the three-month suspension.

In the Feb. 27 edition of The Advocate, Rooney is quoted as saying that “blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children.”

Rooney, 71, who previously had come under fire from homosexual-rights groups for remarks about gays and AIDS in a CBS-TV special in December, also is quoted as saying that, while he felt that gays have been the victims of prejudice, he found the homosexual act “repugnant” and homosexuality “not normal.”

In an interview with The Times following his suspension, Rooney denied that remarks he made to The Advocate in a phone interview with one of its reporters expressed racial bias. However, he confirmed he had written a controversial letter to the magazine commenting on gays in response to criticisms of his views on homosexuality.

“I am guilty of what I said about gays, and I deeply regret having offended them,” Rooney said. “But on the other charge, I am absolutely innocent. I never made any remark about blacks having ‘watered down’ their genes. I never made or thought the statement attributed to me. I am just infuriated by the notion that I am being called a racist. Anyone who knows me knows that is not true.”

But Rooney said in a formal statement that “Mr. Burke was put in a difficult position, and I accepted his offer of suspension rather than to permanently end my career at CBS.”

Rooney has been with CBS since 1959 and became a regular on the popular “60 Minutes” in September, 1978. He also has written eight books.

The network had not taken any action against Rooney following protests from homosexual-rights groups over his December TV special, “The Year With Andy Rooney,” in which he said that in 1989 people had recognized that many self-induced ills, such as “too much alcohol, too much food, drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes . . . (are) all known to lead quite often to premature death.”

In a previous letter to The Advocate, Rooney had apologized for offending gays in the special and promised to be “more careful.” But representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) were meeting this week for the second time with executives at CBS News to discuss Rooney’s remarks in the special and overall reporting on gays in the news.

“We feel that justice has been done,” Craig Davidson, executive director of GLAAD, said in response to the suspension Thursday. “It’s unfortunate that it may have taken racial remarks rather than homophobic ones to push it over the line. But the statements show that different kinds of bigotry can exist in the same person.”

“We are pleased that CBS has moved so promptly,” Benjamin J. Hooks, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement. “We have been greatly distressed over this incident. We think CBS has made a good beginning in imposing a three-month suspension.”

Hooks added that the NAACP did not wish to “rush to judgment in this matter” and sought a “further and thorough investigation.”

In 1988, CBS fired Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder as a sports analyst after he told a Washington television station that blacks were bred to be better athletes than whites.

Network officials declined to explain Thursday why Rooney had been suspended rather than dismissed.

Former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite released a statement in Rooney’s defense.

“I’ve known Rooney for almost half a century and I know he’s not a racist,” Cronkite said. “He is an independent thinker and a courageous social critic. His more outrageous comments are bound to offend one element or another of the population from time to time, but any suggestion that such a rare journalistic voice should be silenced indicates a dangerous weakness in our pluralistic, democratic society.”

The racial remarks attributed to Rooney were made in what The Advocate said was a 20-minute interview conducted several weeks ago by Chris Bull, a New York-based correspondent for the publication. Although the interview was not tape-recorded, Bull said in an interview with The Times that “I stand by the accuracy of the story.”

Bull said that he had called Rooney regarding his comments about gays in the December TV program.

“He was not mean or vindictive, but I thought he expressed a lot of outdated ideas about AIDS and homosexuality,” Bull maintained.

Bull said that he was surprised by Rooney’s remarks about race.

“I said, ‘What you just said sounds like racism,’ giving him a chance to respond. But he didn’t give any indication that he wanted to back down.”

According to Rooney, his remarks about race came in a discussion with The Advocate reporter about education.

“He said that a lot of people don’t know much about homosexuality, and I said there were a lot of problems with education, and not only schools but kids. I said that one of our problems is that some of the least fit among us are proliferating. In big-city schools, you have kids dropping out of seventh grade, and then those kids having babies, making for a society of people that don’t go through schools. In most cases, those are black kids. In West Virginia, it’s white kids. It looks like a racial comment, but it’s not.”

He added that he had participated in sit-ins against racial discrimination when he was in the military during the 1940s. With regard to his remarks about gays, Rooney said: “I feel very badly if I did anything to make their lives more difficult. I think gays have been prejudiced against. I am not gay, and I am puzzled by gays.”