50 Years of 60 Minutes
Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Posted Sat, Sep 15 2001
Don Hewitt is the most accomplished producer in television news. In 1968, already a television news veteran at age 45, Hewitt invented the broadcast news magazine. He named it 60 Minutes. By mixing investigative reporting, explanatory journalism, celebrity profiles, editorial commentary and occasional humor, Hewitt found a format that captivated millions of viewers for CBS-TV.
From the start of 60 Minutes, Hewitt bucked another piece of conventional wisdom by featuring numerous segments with international content. With the Vietnam War raging, Hewitt brought Morley Safer onto the 60 Minutes crew. Safer had previously been stationed in Vietnam for CBS. In March 1971, just a few months after joining the television news magazine, Safer broke a story that helped cement U.S. citizen opposition to further involvement in the conflict.
Safer decided to re-examine what had occurred on Aug. 4, 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the North Vietnamese coast. Early in the broadcast, he repeated the government versions about how “the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy were attacked by Communist torpedo boats.” Then Safer uttered three words pregnant with meaning: “Or were they?”
The remainder of the segment, based in part on previously undisclosed cable traffic, explained how President Lyndon Johnson and Congress reacted aggressively to what was at most a minor incident, or perhaps a non-incident.
Hewitt is particularly proud of another international report. Correspondent Mike Wallace made contact with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini soon after his countrymen took Americans hostage at the embassy in Tehran in 1979.
“Wallace was the only newsman the Ayatollah agreed to see and so, at that moment, he was the only link our State Department had to something that had never happened before and that had them completely flummoxed about what to do,” Hewitt recalls. “With the interview Mike conducted … in the holy city of Qom, unedited and in its entirety, about to be fed by satellite to the control room … I got a call … from Assistant Secretary of State Hodding Carter, asking if Secretary of State Cyrus Vance could listen in. Of course, I said.”
That “of course” demonstrates how Hewitt gained dominance over long-form television news in the long run by going against accepted practice in the short run. Most journalists would not have allowed a Cabinet member to listen at that point. Hewitt says unapologetically, though, that sometimes “being an American takes precedence over being a journalist.”
Hewitt developed his international perspective during World War II. When he was having a few days off in London as a cadet of the Merchant Marine Academy, Hewitt showed up unbidden at the office of Stars & Stripes, the newspaper for the military contingent stationed outside the United States, and persuaded Stars & Stripes editors that they needed somebody—namely him—to write about the exploits of the Merchant Marine. He became hooked on journalism.
After World War II, Hewitt tried newspaper reporting and editing, including photo editing, but never found the right fit. One day in 1948, he received a call from a former newspaper colleague at CBS Radio, who had heard about an opening at CBS Television for someone with picture-editing experience.
Hewitt had never watched television, so he scurried over to the Grand Central Railroad terminal to catch a glimpse. He found himself mesmerized. Hewitt accepted the job and never looked back in regret.
In 1953 he received his first international assignment: to produce CBS’ coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. The coverage turned out to be a success, feeding Hewitt’s desire to bring the world to viewers in their armchairs.
But during those nascent years, Hewitt possessed nothing akin to the 60 Minutes budget available after the program became profitable beyond anyone’s projections. 60 Minutes aired segments from South Africa and the Middle East that sensitized viewers to the seemingly eternal hatreds and that placed pressure on the U.S. government to do the right thing.
Hewitt’s instincts told him as well when to lay off. “Never have I seen a story played out of proportion to its worth than the media circus that grew up around Elian Gonzalez. ... Think about it: Giving Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba caused a bigger ruckus than giving the Panama Canal back to Panama.
“Cover the news? Absolutely,” Hewitt says. “But please don’t stay on the air and fill time and tell us that, in effect, you can’t get off the air.”
Hewitt’s memoir, while understandably placing his spin on his career, oozes candor. In the international segments and otherwise, this breezy memoir is filled with entertaining anecdotes and instructive thoughts about the past, present and future of television news.
Watching the Watchdogs in Nigeria
Watching the Watchdogs—Media Review @ 10 is a compilation of 67 essays, reports and critiques published in the last 10 years in the Media Review magazine, Nigeria’s journal of the media.
The 320-page book covers major developments on the Nigerian media scene in the last decade, including the birth of private broadcasting after four decades of strangulating state monopoly, the end of military rule and the birth of liberal democracy; the establishment of a copyright commission to protect intellectual property rights; and the birth of an advertising regulatory body to protect consumers against spurious claims.
Salient issues related to conflict reporting in two religious conflicts are also examined as well as the challenge of covering the Liberian war faced by Nigerian journalists, two of whom lost their lives in the process.
By Lanre Idowu
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Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.