The Magnificence and Threatened Legacy of CBS’s 60 Minutes

And a moment from television's past.

L-R Correspondents Harry Reasoner. Ed Bradley. Morley Safer, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace and the “60 Mnutes” impresario Don Hewitt

Update: On October 6, Bari Weiss was named “Editor in Chief” of CBS News reporting to the owner of Paramount, David Ellison. I met her once, briefly. She and I were joining Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet political prisoner a leading figure in Israeli politics. I was his publisher and friend of decades. She was his admirer, which she enthusiastically expressed.

Weiss has had an extraordinary career. In 2020, she published How to Fight Anti-Semitism which won the National Jewish Book Award. She was a book reviewer and op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal and had a op-ed and commentary role at The New York Times, leaving in 2020 assailing its reflexively left-leaning culture.

Her digital publication The Free Press has been from all accounts a great success, reporting 1.5 million free and paid subscribers, making it a preminent site on Substack. She is aligned with the University of Austin, a start-up institution also founded on principles critical of mainstream academic and media conventions, considered doctrinally liberal.

Bari Weiss is a phenomenon. The question is how well she can navigate the CBS approach to journalism, the experience and egos of a staff with deep experience in their profession which she does not have -- and developing a style that commands respect from those who work for her, which she now clearly has from her boss, David Ellison.

That she has flair and entrepreneurial instincts has been proven. This role is a very different and formidable challenge.

60 Minutes proved that television news, done with flair, can be worthwhile and profitable at the same time, in fact, very profitable. In that regard, no one honestly believes that the heads of the networks woke up one morning and said to themselves, “You know, I don’t think we are doing enough to inform the American people.” What they woke up and said to themselves was, “Can you believe the money that 60 Minutes makes?”

— from Don Hewitt’s memoir, Tell Me a Story, published in 2001

The late Don Hewitt, who died in 2009, was a genius. He was the creator and executive producer of the CBS News program 60 Minutes, from its first broadcast in 1968, and led it through decades as an overall top-ten television program — and in some years the “single most profitable hour in the history of television,” as Hewitt bragged, somewhat ruefully, in his memoir.

Why?

Because Hewitt recognized that in the competition between news as an essential public service and news as money-making entertainment, the outcome was inevitable. As 60 Minutes begins its fifty-eighth season this fall, the context is especially noteworthy, for two reasons:

· CBS’s former owners at Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit brought by President Trump about the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million, and in anticipation of that outcome both the president of CBS News and the executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned. The settlement was widely considered a payoff to get the federal government’s approval for the sale of Paramount Global to Skydance Media, which had been stalled for months.

· Skydance Media’s CEO, David Ellison, now the CEO of the merged company, Paramount Skydance, has shown his intention to corral CBS News within parameters acceptable to Trump — which undermines the principles of brash independence that Don Hewitt and his colleagues had fiercely upheld for so long.

The tensions inherent in gathering the news, presenting it, paying for it, and measuring its value are time-tested subjects. By the nature of its journalism — investigative, challenging, often deliberately provocative — complaints about 60 Minutes pieces were predictable. There have been lawsuits, threatened and actual, along with the claim that the program reflected ideological or political biases.

Even well before 60 Minutes, the possibility of retribution by a political target made CBS’s ownership uneasy. George Clooney’s film (and later, theatrical hit) Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow’s attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, conveyed the tension in the 1950s between CBS News and the network’s founder and chairman, William S. Paley, about possible repercussions.

Murrow had the stature to press ahead. But his legendary producer, Fred Friendly, left CBS a decade later because the network refused to preempt soap operas to broadcast U.S. Senate hearings on the Vietnam war.

When Larry Tisch, a business mogul, bought CBS decades later, he was less politically uptight (as I recall) but began a relentless round of cost-cutting and even came, largely unsuccessfully, after the 60 Minutes budget.

As he emphasized in his book and to anyone who might question him, Don Hewitt’s uppermost priority — sustained in the years following his retirement in 2004 — was to get the best possible story, regardless of who might be embarrassed or indignant. Don’s power was the program’s enormous success.

So, what’s different now? Circumstances and context.

The early years of television news reflected the culture of that era: post-war national exuberance at the phenomenon represented by television, and the Federal Communications Commission’s adherence to the Fairness Doctrine, which rendered programming politically middle-of-the–road, by today’s standards.

Then came the age of the top-tier “anchor” (a term Hewitt coined): Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and the esteemed trio of Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather, the last and the feistiest of the group.

When President Lyndon Johnson watched Walter Cronkite conclude on the air in February 1968 that the Vietnam war was a stalemate, he reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

While talk radio has always been opinionated and vituperative, it was the advent of Fox News, MSNBC, and the free-for-all of the internet and social media that emphasized the polarizing aspects of news rather than moderation.

And Hewitt’s belief that profit incentives tend to determine broadcast choices, even for news, remains the case, and more so.

What’s much more prevalent now is that what is considered to be news — and truth — is subject to interpretation on a plainly political spectrum.

Hewitt’s heirs will have to resist MAGA-style attacks and intimidation. Ellison’s hiring of Keith R. Weinstein, the former president of a conservative think tank with no news experience, as ombudsman is an ominous sign, as is his plan to acquire (for a reported $100 million or more) The Free Press, a commentary and news site that positions itself in opposition to the values of traditional news organizations, and to create a leadership role at CBS News for The Free Press’s founder, Bari Weiss.

My assumption is that in the coming years CBS News will be navigating competing pressures of profit and politics greater than the staff have ever confronted before.

Don Hewitt’s portrait should be prominently displayed everywhere, as a reminder of his commitment to the story, wherever it leads.

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The weeklong suspension of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC and the cancellation eight months from now of Stephen Colbert by CBS recalls this much earlier moment in television history. That was then. This is now.

Jack Paar was taken off the air in 1960 due to a censorship issue by NBC. The network had cut a joke about a "water closet" from the previous night's show, which was perceived as offensive by some viewers. Paar, who was upset by the cut, walked off the set and left the audience confused. He later returned to the show after a month off, apologizing for his outburst and expressing his dissatisfaction with the censorship.