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May 2001
The 60 Minutes Man
How journalism meets entertainment at Don Hewitt's 60 Minutes.
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For networks and journalists, the money, glory, and power are in entertainment. |
As a boy growing up in suburban New Rochelle, New York, in the 1930s, Don Hewitt would go to the movies and ponder whether he wanted to be Hildy Johnson, the fast-talking, intrepid newspaper reporter of The Front Page, or Julian Marsh, the manic theater impresario of 42nd Street. When Hewitt landed at CBS in 1948 as a news director, after having reported for Stars and Stripes while serving as a merchant marine during World War II, he says he found the solution to his dilemma: As a television journalist, he could be both Johnson and Marsh.
Or so Hewitt, the legendary creator and executive producer of 60 Minutes, claims. Approaching 80, Hewitt has become an elder statesman of journalism and one of its most honored practitioners precisely because he has shown journalists a third way. However, Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television (PublicAffairs), his loping, loose-jointed, anecdotal memoir, tells another tale, one that chronicles the strange, tension-ridden relationship between the mission of journalism to inform and the imperative of show business to entertain. Hewitt unwittingly provides an account of the slow demise of traditional journalism at the hands of entertainment; it could be subtitled: "How Marsh Strangled Johnson."
In the beginning of broadcast journalism, of course, there was that icon of integrity, Edward R. Murrow, and Hewitt pays his obligatory respects to the CBS of Murrow and, later, Walter Cronkite, where the emphasis was on getting the story, telling it accurately, and telling it well. Even though broadcast news was mandated by an activist Federal Communications Commission, which required the networks to provide it in exchange for the use of the airwaves, members of the Murrow generation took the public interest seriously. They saw themselves not as pioneers for a new kind of journalism but as legatees of the stolid old journalism found in The New York Times or the Herald Tribune. As Hewitt puts it, they "weren't the best journalists in broadcasting -- they were the best journalists in journalism."
But if Murrow and company were seen -- and saw themselves -- as paragons of journalistic virtue, Hewitt also points out that it wasn't long before these stalwarts lost some of their piety. When Murrow's showcase public-affairs program See It Now couldn't even survive in the vast emptiness of Sunday afternoon against Amos 'n' Andy, Murrow realized that he could no longer fight entertainment -- he would have to join it to save his franchise at CBS. And so Murrow made like Barbara Walters and began hosting Person to Person, a celebrity-interview program. The wall between news and entertainment was breached, but the breach was inevitable once broadcasters stopped thinking of news as a public service and started thinking of it as programming, and once journalists felt they had to please as well as inform an audience to stay on the air.
Hewitt, who comes across in this memoir as anything but introspective, seems never to have agonized much over the sanctity of journalism. After all, his model was The Front Page's tabloid reporter Hildy Johnson, and he can write without malice, "Of course, it's not only about journalism anymore. If it were only about journalism, they wouldn't pay these incredible salaries." Early on, Hewitt's mind was so impregnated with the movies and with drama that even as a merchant marine watching two RAF planes escort his ship after the convoy had been attacked by Germans, all he could think was: "Where's the music? Without a Hollywood score to go with it, it wasn't happening."
Later, as producer and director of the CBS Evening News and of special events, including the first Nixon-Kennedy debate, Hewitt was a bare-knuckled journalist of the yellow-press school who viewed journalism as competition. Knowing that he was going against the Murrow tradition, Hewitt takes a certain pride in the fact that his idea for a television newsmagazine program was initially rejected by the CBS News pooh-bahs before a new news-division president green-lighted it in 1968 -- largely to antagonize his predecessor. He appears to take a perverse pride, too, in the fact that when 60 Minutes began landing regularly in the top-ten ratings after being shifted from Tuesday to Sunday evenings, it demonstrated that a network could actually reap huge profits from its news division. "For a while," he writes, "we were the single most profitable hour in the history of television," and he admits that his first thought when Mike Wallace once collapsed during a flight they were on was: "Now we're never going to catch Cheers!" Thus did Hewitt introduce a new standard of value against which broadcast journalism would henceforth be measured. Of course, it was the same standard against which entertainment programming had always been measured: ratings cum profit.
As Hewitt puts it in Tell Me a Story, the basic concept of 60 Minutes, inspired by Life magazine, was variety-show journalism. Instead of the traditional hourlong, single-subject documentary made famous by Murrow, there would be different pieces -- shorter, tighter, more easily digestible, and always, as the title of the memoir suggests, with a strong story line to keep viewers engrossed. Hewitt also introduced a star system in which his reporters played themselves getting the story: aggressive Mike Wallace, wry Morley Safer, homespun Harry Reasoner. The typecasting was as reliable as that of any Hollywood movie: As soon as you saw Mike Wallace, you knew someone was going to squirm.
It is likely that the 60 Minutes aesthetic would have dominated television journalism sooner or later, even if Hewitt hadn't invented it, because it is entertaining -- certainly more entertaining than Murrow's solemn CBS Reports -- and entertainment always triumphs when ratings are the objective. Still, Hewitt remains enough of a traditionalist that when onetime CBS News head Van Gordon Sauter snarls, "You're not in news, you're in television," Hewitt takes umbrage. There may be a thin line between entertainment and news, Hewitt says, but he insists that he knows how to walk it.
But he seems to recognize that he is exercising some willful blindness here, saying at one point that his segments had to be "edited down to a manageable twelve to fifteen minutes to deal with the viewers' attention span," and at another asserting of his new variety blend, "Entertaining? Wasn't that a dirty word when used in connection with the news? Not to me." Story journalism and information journalism are by no means mutually exclusive, but neither are they identical. Story journalism obviously gives priority to those subjects that lend themselves to drama, while large and complex issues, like the savings-and-loan scandal or nuclear proliferation, aren't as easily adaptable or likely to be covered. And if they are covered, they are likely to be forced into a dramatic mold that often simplifies and distorts them. Moreover, the idea of variety-show journalism -- a celebrity profile, followed by an exposé, followed by a human-interest story, with a comic digestif by Andy Rooney -- is itself a value judgment. It suggests that these are equally deserving of our attention, an implied equivalence that can make the important seem trivial or the trivial seem important. More significant, the techniques of entertaining storytelling can change the story and our attitude toward it just as surely as those old movies changed Hewitt's attitude toward the war. Now, as then, it may not seem to be a story without the music.
Most of all, though, entertainment journalism replaces the reporter's sense of what the public needs to know with his sense of what it wants to know. In denying this, Hewitt is being just plain disingenuous. He may say of 60 Minutes that "by getting awards and making money, we proved you can do good and do well at the same time," but he also knows that the only way to make money is to lure the public. "We could look into Marilyn Monroe's closet so long as we looked in Robert Oppenheimer's laboratory, too," he writes, without adducing any journalistic reason for peeking into Marilyn's closet. In that vein he defends 60 Minutes's airing of the Kathleen Willey story by insisting that Willey was telling the truth when she claimed that President Clinton groped her in the Oval Office. How does he know? Because she told the same story to the grand jury under oath. What he avoids saying is why he ran the story in the first place -- especially since he pointedly claims later in the book that the public's right to know doesn't translate into the media's obligation to broadcast. But anyone can pretty much guess his motives: He ran it because it was good and salacious and would get ratings, as did a videotape of Dr. Jack Kevorkian enabling a suicide. Hewitt's reason for airing it? The "tape might reopen the debate over physician-assisted suicide." Yeah, sure. How about that it was great and highly promotable TV?
Hewitt does most of his tucking and filling when it comes to the Jeffrey Wigand case, which was the basis for the film The Insider. As the movie told it, Hewitt knuckled under to CBS brass when Wigand, a former vice-president of research for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, reluctantly agreed, in response to the prodding of a 60 Minutes producer named Lowell Bergman, to break a nondisclosure agreement with the company and reveal what he claimed was evidence that B&W not only knew cigarette smoking was harmful but also had deliberately spiked cigarettes with additives to keep smokers hooked. When CBS's legal department told Hewitt that the network would be potentially liable to B&W for billions of dollars for inducing Wigand to break his agreement, Hewitt, by his own admission, didn't much protest. "There were a hundred people who worked there and depended on me," he writes, "and I wasn't about to let them down." Still, Hewitt goes on for pages about the broadcast 60 Minutes did air, which enumerated the dangers of tobacco and openly admitted that CBS couldn't show the real story. It was, brags Hewitt, the first time "a network-news broadcast" held "its own management's feet to the fire," though the words sound a bit hollow given the cop-out.
Hewitt later learned that at the time of the Wigand interview -- which eventually aired after The Wall Street Journal broke Wigand's story -- then- CBS chairman Laurence Tisch was negotiating with B&W to buy six of its discount brands for another Tisch holding, the Lorillard Tobacco Company, and Hewitt suspects that that influenced the decision not to air the Wigand segment. The real wall breached seems not to be the one between news and entertainment but the one between news and business -- the so-called church and state of journalism.
Hewitt rightfully bristles at Tisch's apostasy, yet it is not so easy to distinguish the effects of this kind of overt corporate pressure from the more subtle effects of getting ratings to make money. And it is harder still to distinguish either of these from the even more insidious pressure from journalists themselves to report stories that will land them big salaries and stardom -- a desire that may actually have a more profound effect on the nature of news than any corporate pressure. As Hewitt candidly says, "We want the companies we work for to put back the wall the pioneers erected to separate news from entertainment, but we are not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment-size paycheck for broadcasting news."
Hewitt himself is a kind of object lesson in the fact that the values of broadcast journalism didn't just change because journalism became beholden to ratings and profits but that journalism became beholden to ratings and profits because the values of the people attracted to broadcast journalism had changed. Obviously, Murrow and Cronkite weren't immune to the blandishments of money or fame. But one senses that for them, at least at the outset, journalism was the end, not the vehicle, whereas for Hewitt, a child of the entertainment age, one can't be so sure. For networks and journalists alike, the money and the glory and the power are in entertainment. And that is where journalism continues to be headed -- just where Don Hewitt has led it. 
Neal Gabler is the author of Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.
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