Don Hewitt's Durable Hour

Back in 1989, in an interview at his New York office, Don Hewitt, inventor of 60 Minutes and the modern TV newsmagazine, reflected on the program's legacy: "We changed the face of television. In our wake came PM Magazine, That's Incredible!, 20/20, God knows how many NBC magazines. . . . They just keep coming out of the woodwork for a very simple reason. They look for the profit-or-loss thing and say, 'That's the way to make money.'"

But in the summer of 1993 he tells a slightly different story about the proliferation of TV magazines prompted by 60 Minutes's impressive profit margins. "60 Minutes has single-handedly ruined television," he said in a phone interview. "No one can report news today without making money."

The most lucrative program in network history, 60 Minutes and its 1,107 shows (through August) have made more than $ 1 billion for CBS. In some years, by some estimates, it has accounted for as much as half the network's entire broadcast revenues. The only program to rank number one in three different decades (1979-80, 1982-83, 1991-92, 1992-93), it is also the most popular program in prime-time history -- the only program to finish among the Nielsen top ten for sixteen consecutive seasons (and counting). Any episode of 60 Minutes reaches a bigger audience -- nearly 32 million viewers each Sunday -- than any other single news form in the history of American journalism.

60 Minutes, which premiered on September 24, 1968, celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this fall. Although its reporters (whose average age is about sixty) and viewers (roughly half of whom are over fifty) get older each year, its clout as a power broker is, if anything, stronger than ever. Hillary and Bill Clinton took the Gennifer Flowers story and his sinking political campaign to 60 Minutes on Superbowl Sunday early in 1992 in front of the single biggest audience the Clintons would have throughout the campaign. As Hewitt rightly claims, "You hardly heard about Gennifer Flowers after that episode."

Ross Perot -- whom Hewitt calls a friend and the "greatest combination of good sense and nonsense of anybody I've ever known" -- took his resurrected campaign to 60 Minutes early last fall and saw his rising poll go flat as he told exotic tales of harassment at the hands of scary Black Panthers.

Hewitt, who is seventy, says that the "feeding frenzy of [television news] magazines' is "less about giving the news to America than it is about giving the word to Hollywood: anything you can do, we can do cheaper" -- a reference to the fact that by investing in the magazine format the networks avoid having to pay hefty license fees for Hollywood-produced programming. (This shift, in turn, doomed the single-issue documentary, a genre CBS excelled in.) Because CBS owns 60 Minutes, it can generally make back its production costs -- around $ 500,000 per show (compared to around $ 1.3 million for an episode of Northern Exposure) -- by selling one or two minutes of commercial time. The program now earns between $ 50 million (industry estimates) and $ 70 million (Hewitt's estimate) a year. For CBS, this is like owning its own mint.

Several factors, including viewer interest in the Watergate drama and Nixon's downfall, contributed to 60 Minutes's dramatic rise in the '70s. CBS's decision in 1975 to use the program to counter Sunday evening children's programming on other networks with a more adult menu also helped, as did the arrival the same year of Dan Rather, fresh from the White House beat and at the peak of his popularity.

A few years ago Hewitt cited his Middle-American common sense as another reason for the show's popularity. "My strength is that I have the common touch," he said. "I don't know why this is, because most of the people I hang around with are pretty elite. But Kiwanians, Rotarians, I understand them. . . . Maybe it's because I grew up in New Rochelle, the small town that George M. Cohan wrote 45 Minutes From Broadway about. It was very Middle-American."

And then, of course, there's the sheer narrative strength of the show. "There's a very simple formula if you're in Hollywood, opera, publishing, broadcasting, newspapering," Hewitt likes to say. "It's four very simple words: tell me a story." Taking a cue from the mixed menu offered by Life and Time, the program would counter the documentary form with "personal" journalism in a multi-subject format. "Instead of dealing with issues, we tell stories" and "package news as well as Hollywood packages fiction," Hewitt adds.

In fact, on the very first program back in 1968, Harry Reasoner aligned 60 Minutes not with the fact-gathering traditions of print journalism but with the storytelling impulses of art. "All art is the rearrangement of previous perceptions," he said, "and we don't claim this [the first broadcast] is anything more than that, or even that journalism is an art, for that matter. But we do think this is sort of a new approach."

The new approach rearranged experience as thirteen-minute news dramas; whenever possible it shaped the news drama as a detective story; and increasingly it involved casting the reporter in a leading role.

To gauge how central a role 60 Minutes reporters play, all you need to do is count their appearances in individual shots. Take "Brown vs. Koch," a 1988 drama that told the story of a homeless woman, Joyce Brown, and her legal battle with then New York Mayor Ed Koch. While each of the title characters appeared in about 30 of the 120 shots in this segment, reporter Morley Safer showed up in 36. In a 1992 episode about Pentagon waste, Lesley Stahl appeared in 48 shots.

In addition to time, the reporter-stars are almost invariably granted more space than the characters they interview. Interview subjects generally appear in extreme close-ups, often with the top of the head cut from the frame, while the reporters are given lots of visual breathing space (see frames from Mike Wallace's 1975 interview with Eldrige Cleaver, opposite).

Hewitt's current "repertory company" -- his term -- includes Mike Wallace, seventy-five, the Sam Spade of TV journalists; Morley Safer, sixty-one, whose literary style (see his 1971 classic on the Rolls Royce and his 1992 piece on Finland's obsession with the tango) is sometimes ill-suited for tough detective work; Ed Bradley, fifty-two, whose trademark specs and professorial scowl have been trained on many a villain since he replaced Dan Rather; Steve Kroft, the only reporter under fifty, a refugee from West 57th, CBS's yuppie version of a magazine, who still fawns in his celebrity profiles; and Lesley Stahl, fifty-one, the latest token woman, who, like Rather, once covered the White house. Andy Rooney, seventy-four provides comic relief with droll observations on life's foibles and follies.

Over the years, the reporters have been cast as detectives, prosecutors, therapists, tourists, talk show hosts, celebrants of celebrities -- and, occasionally, as heroes. Mike Wallace was the first American reporter to "negotiate" face-to-face with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran early in the 1979 hostage crisis. In 1980, Dan Rather, dressed in native costume, trudged alongside anti-Soviet guerrillas in "Inside Afghanistan." In 1981, Ed Bradley strolled hand-in-hand across a New York street with singer Lena Horne as part of a story about making it in a white-dominated world.

Both Hewitt and Wallace have called 60 Minutes a collection of "morality plays," and one of the main strategies employed to bring gritty life to the struggle between vice and virtue is to merge reporting practices with the literary traditions of the detective novel. Thus, a segment will identify a given crime and the reporter-detective will interview victim, villains, and bystanders who provide evidence that will be sifted by the intrepid reporter. It is no coincidence that in 1984, pairing what would become the two most-popular detective shows on television, CBS scheduled Murder, She Wrote right after 60 Minutes.

For 60 Minutes, the detective formula is as reliable as the inverted pyramid is for print; it has accommodated subjects as diverse as waterfront crime, spy satellites, government cover-ups, racial discrimination, child pornography, Nazis, Valium, diamond scams, the Teamsters, the Audi 5000, MSG, Brazilian machismo, Mormons, horse doping, art theft, and the sale of Romanian babies.

The genre has its critics. By cultivating the role of bulldog detective, 60 Minutes pays homage to what New York university journalism professor Jay Rosen calls "the cult of toughness." Often this toughness is an end in itself; the reporter is considered to have done his or her job just by showing up or roughing up an interview subject. What Edward J. Epstein said of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men -- which transformed Watergate into a detective story -- applies to 60 Minutes: "If the reporter can be established as an intrepid, omniscient Sherlock Holmes, the focus of attention is shifted" away from "the real powers that be."

Mike Wallace, in his autobiography, Close Encounters, has written that viewers regard the program as an "unofficial ombudsman." Certainly many segments over the years have concluded with 60 Minutes playing the role of public advocate -- reporters calling for congressional investigations, presenting the case for prisoners deemed to be innocent, and so on -- but the program generally avoids endorsing action or calling for change. When it does follow up on a case or problem, the report is usually tacked onto a summer rerun.

The controversies in 60 Minutes's history largely center on alleged "villains" who insist they have been wrongly accused. The Illinois Power Company, the apple industry (the famous Alar-EPA episodes), the food processors using MSG, and a foreign car manufacturer (the 1986 Audi 5000 "unintended acceleration" tale) have all launched media campaigns against what they claim are unfair depictions and misleading stories. Yet Hewitt notes with pride that the show has never lost a libel case in court (although at least one suit was settled out of court, and another dragged on for a dozen years).

While politically 60 Minutes manages to appear conservative to liberals and liberal to conservatives, when it comes to the issue of gender equality, few would argue that 60 Minutes is on the cutting edge. The program was sixteen years old before Hewitt hired Diane Sawyer as the first woman reporter in 1984. Meredith Vieria, who came over in 1989 from West 57th, did time briefly on the show but left in a pubic dispute with Hewitt over maternity leave (she wanted to work part-time; he wanted her full-time).

Marion Goldin, who produced episodes for Mike Wallace and Dan Rather over the course of more than fifteen years, quit twice, partly because of what she saw as pervasive sexism at the network, partly because of her own search for independence as a producer. "I'm really proud of what I did, what we did, on 60 Minutes," Goldin says, but adds that network journalism remains "very male-dominated . . . especially 60 Minutes." She says that, against her better judgment, she too often replicated such industry-wide stereotypes as presenting 'men as authority figures and women as victims." (In fairness to 60 Minutes, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented a persistent pattern of patriarchy in the national news in the form of white male guest "experts" -- well over 80 percent -- on both ABC's Nightline and PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.)

Anther complaint by producers at 60 Minutes is that Hewitt seldom gives credit where credit is due. Over the years 60 Minutes reporters have typically been assigned five producers, each of whom works independently, calling in the reporter only for the final round of on-screen interviews, stand-up visuals, and reaction shots. This makes for an efficient system that maximizes use of the star reporter while allowing individual producers to spend weeks researching and shaping a report. Goldin, who quit 60 Minutes finally in 1988 ("I should have known things weren't going to change"), says that while Mike Wallace always credited his producers for their hard work, Hewitt did not. (His 1985 book about the program, Minute by Minute, is strikingly reticent on the subject of the program's producers.)

Despite its "repertory" of star reporters, 60 Minutes remains fundamentally a producer's medium, as Hewitt's strong role as executive producer affirms. It also remains stubbornly resistant to change -- an innovative program that, having attained maturity, resists innovation. A memorable exception was "Looking at 60 Minutes," which was aired a dozen years ago. The show featured a roundtable panel of print journalists, Hewitt and Wallace, and Herb Schmertz of Mobil Oil, with Jeff Greenfield serving as moderator, and examined issues raised by past 60 Minutes segments -- ambush interviews, hidden cameras, and reporters misrepresenting themselves in order to get a story. The episode was Marion Goldin's idea. "We were just looking to do something different. We were critiquing everybody else," Goldin says. "Why not look at ourselves?"

While no one can dispute 60 Minutes's importance in the history of television, it is intriguing to try to fit the program into the current hot debate about modern and "postmodern" news. Writing for Rolling Stone in March 1992, former CBS news producer Jon Katz pitted the modern Old News ("pooped, confused, and broke") against the postmodern New News ("dazzling, adolescent, irresponsible, fearless, frightening, and powerful") -- a media battleground where public discourse about important issues is just as likely to come from movies, music, Oprah, and Bart Simpson as from newspapers, news-magazines, Nightline, and Dan Rather. "Increasingly," Katz argued, "the New News is seizing the functions of mainstream journalism, sparking conversations, and setting the country's social and political agenda."

Don Hewitt might wince at the New News crashing the elite news media's party; he still seems to believe in the boundaries that are now being blurred: "There's a fine line between show biz and news biz," he said in a recent interview. "The trick is to wake up to that line and touch it with your toe but don't cross it. And some people stay so far away from the line that nobody wants to watch what they do. And other people keep crossing the line. . . . But there has to be a line because the line is called truth."

Yet, as the first TV news show to regularly cross the arbitrary line between news and entertainment by framing documentaries as detective stories, and by turning reporters into performers, 60 Minutes is the missing link between the Old and New News.

The detective format easily embraces the "gotcha" approach, which is a tough modern form of Old News and therefore seems less revolutionary than the transformation of reporter into persona -- analyst, talk show host, profiler of politicians and celebrities. The talk show format, regularly used by 60 Minutes, clearly belongs in the New News domain.

The use of the reporter as lay analyst or talk therapist represents another blurring of the Old News line between hard and soft, a foray into territory that used to be dismissed as the province of women's magazines. For example, in "Anderson of Illinois," a 1980 campaign story, Morley Safer conducted a free-association test on independent presidential candidate John Anderson: "For an underdog, Andenrson is a gentle soul who does not speak harshly of his rivals, even when you play the candidate game with him. . . . I'll give you a name," he instructed Anderson, "and you give me an answer. Ronald Reagan?"

Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor says of the New News, "It's ruder, it's cruder, it's sometimes lewder, but on balance, it's almost certainly better for democracy." Meanwhile, MIT professor David Thorburn identifies a specific contribution 60 Minutes stories make to American democracy: the mythologizing of the core culture. The show, Thorburn says, provides a "consensus narrative," a term he uses to describe a group of stories that "articulate the culture's central mythologies . . . an inheritance of shared stories, plots, character types, cultural symbols, and narrative conventions. Such a language is popular," Thorburn says, "because it is legible to the common understanding of a majority of the culture."

Don Hewitt has his own mythology. As he said in a 1989 interview: ". . . very few things in America look the same way they did when you were a kid. The stores look different, the gas stations look different, the toll booths look different, everything looks different. 60 Minutes looks the same. There was some talk . . . about we ought to change it. . . . I said, 'No!' It's almost like that comforting feeling when you go visit grandpa in the summer and you say, 'Oh my God, that screen door still sticks. He never fixed it.' And you love it. And if you went back and the screen door opened and it didn't squeak, you'd be disappointed. Well, I like the screen door to squeak a little."

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