September 24, 1968—TV news took another step forward with 60 Minutes, CBS’ answer to the newsmagazine format. Creator Don Hewitt saw it as a vehicle for exploring, in greater depth, topics that would not fit into the tight two minutes allotted for CBS Evening News but would not require the full hour devoted to a documentary. (Nowadays, of course, he could forget about the latter.)
The program began with Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner as the on-air correspondents, to be joined over the years by, at one point or another, Morley Safer, Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley, Steve Croft, Bob Simon, Lara Logan, and God knows who else. (The number of part-time contributors has grown, making for, I’m sure, quite a lot of competitive yelping for air time.)
Hewitt’s advice to his correspondents—and, I might add, to the unseen producers who, like so much else in TV, are the real movers of the show—was consistent for as long as he ran the show: “Tell me a story.” That might be reflected in a sidelight piece on a major news story, a celebrity profile (a more sophisticated version of the Person to Person show that even the sainted Edward R. Murrow once aired), but more often on the hard-hitting investigative pieces run by the show over the years. In this regard, no on-air figure imparted his personality more powerfully to the show than Wallace, whose bulldog interrogation technique is one that prosecutors probably study enviously.
Over the course of 40 years, 60 Minutes' record has been mixed. It can certainly point to major successes that made a difference in the lives of people, such as searing pieces on Lenell Geter and the Duke University lacrosse players. Most ignominiously, it bowed to pressure from sponsors and legal eagles when it sat on Jeffrey Wigand’s explosive charges against the tobacco industry.
More generally, the show’s techniques—including the use of false identities, sting operations staged for the camera, surprising a subject on camera and chasing him around, and highly selective editing—have come in for well-justified criticism. My own favorites among the show’s segments, then, include the following, all of which, while personality pieces, still manage to convey something about the subjects:
* Clint Eastwood, suddenly dropping his amiable personality and fixing Croft with his best Dirty Harry death stare when the correspondent referred to the actor-director’s seven children by five different women, at least single at the time;
* Helen Mirren, talking about her reputation for nude roles in Britain – and playfully suggesting to Safer that they do their interview in the buff, too.
* William F. Buckley Jr., when asked in an interview in the early 1980s about his penchant for big words, responding: “What is wrong with exploring the fecundity of the English language?”
* Johnny Carson, who told Wallace that he wanted his epitaph to read, “I’ll be right back.”
The program began with Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner as the on-air correspondents, to be joined over the years by, at one point or another, Morley Safer, Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley, Steve Croft, Bob Simon, Lara Logan, and God knows who else. (The number of part-time contributors has grown, making for, I’m sure, quite a lot of competitive yelping for air time.)
Hewitt’s advice to his correspondents—and, I might add, to the unseen producers who, like so much else in TV, are the real movers of the show—was consistent for as long as he ran the show: “Tell me a story.” That might be reflected in a sidelight piece on a major news story, a celebrity profile (a more sophisticated version of the Person to Person show that even the sainted Edward R. Murrow once aired), but more often on the hard-hitting investigative pieces run by the show over the years. In this regard, no on-air figure imparted his personality more powerfully to the show than Wallace, whose bulldog interrogation technique is one that prosecutors probably study enviously.
Over the course of 40 years, 60 Minutes' record has been mixed. It can certainly point to major successes that made a difference in the lives of people, such as searing pieces on Lenell Geter and the Duke University lacrosse players. Most ignominiously, it bowed to pressure from sponsors and legal eagles when it sat on Jeffrey Wigand’s explosive charges against the tobacco industry.
More generally, the show’s techniques—including the use of false identities, sting operations staged for the camera, surprising a subject on camera and chasing him around, and highly selective editing—have come in for well-justified criticism. My own favorites among the show’s segments, then, include the following, all of which, while personality pieces, still manage to convey something about the subjects:
* Clint Eastwood, suddenly dropping his amiable personality and fixing Croft with his best Dirty Harry death stare when the correspondent referred to the actor-director’s seven children by five different women, at least single at the time;
* Helen Mirren, talking about her reputation for nude roles in Britain – and playfully suggesting to Safer that they do their interview in the buff, too.
* William F. Buckley Jr., when asked in an interview in the early 1980s about his penchant for big words, responding: “What is wrong with exploring the fecundity of the English language?”
* Johnny Carson, who told Wallace that he wanted his epitaph to read, “I’ll be right back.”
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