Moonves stressed that he's considering all possibilities. It's unclear whether a new format would be ready for Rather's departure in early March, or whether an interim successor would be named.
"Those days are over when you have that guy sitting behind the desk who everyone believes to the nth degree," Moonves told reporters. "It's sort of an antiquated way of news telling and maybe there's a new way of doing it."
He declined to mention potential participants, or comment on a Time magazine report this week that NBC's Katie Couric had been contacted to gauge her interest.
Moonves, the network's president and chief executive officer, conceded that the turmoil at CBS News -- where three executives and a producer were fired last week for their role in the story last fall about President Bush's military service -- has encouraged him to do something dramatic.
Contributing to his plans was the status of "CBS Evening News" as a distant third in the ratings, behind NBC's "Nightly News," with Brian Williams, and ABC's "World News Tonight," with Peter Jennings, Moonves said
Moonves drew a parallel to the network's "The Early Show," whose ratings have inched up since CBS installed a four-person team that includes his wife, Julie Chen. When others are successful with one format, it makes sense to do something different, he said. Almost 30 million people watch the evening news on one of the three networks on most nights, but many of them are older. Young people tend to get their news in bits and pieces, from the Internet and cable, he said.
"We have to try and reinvent that," Moonves said. "One of the ways we're looking at is making it younger and more relevant, something that younger people can relate to as opposed to that guy preaching from the mountaintop about what we should and should not watch."
Asked twice, Moonves wouldn't rule out a role on the evening news for Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, whose "The Daily Show" skewers politicians and the news media each night. Moonves is co-chief executive of Viacom, which owns both CBS and the Comedy Central network.
Except for a brief, poorly received pairing of Rather with Connie Chung in the 1990s, evening news programs have had a single anchor for more than 20 years.
