Since 1968, television's most highly regarded news and information show, 60 Minutes, has
provided in-depth coverage of important events, politicians, and celebrities through impeccable
research, and insightful interviews. Here are just some of the stories about the creation,
production, and impact of 60 Minutes.
Former newspaper editor Don Hewitt joined CBS's news department in 1948, and by 1963,
he'd become executive producer of The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. A couple
of years later, he'd been relegated to making serious, long-form news documentaries.
At one point, he saw that the documentaries he produced pulled in about 10 percent of
the TV audience and he started thinking about ways to double that number.
Hewitt described his thought process to the Television Academy…
"I came up with an idea: make the hour multi-subject to deal with people's attention spans, package
reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction."
Hewitt further developed his concept with another inspiration in mind...
"I stole the idea of 60 Minutes lock, stock and barrel from Life magazine."
A mid-century publishing phenomenon, Life magazine used bold, striking, and large photographs
to tell a mixture of stories that were both serious and light. Hewitt aimed to make a
television version of Life, combining eye-catching visuals with compact, insightful storytelling.
60 Minutes, the first "newsmagazine" on TV, was born, presenting segments as chapters
and using a magazine cover mockup as its logo.
60 Minutes has been an integral part of millions of Americans' Sundays for decades, right up
there with football and family dinners. The program debuted at 10 P.M. on September 24,
1968, which was a Tuesday. At the beginning of the episode, correspondent Harry Reasoner
gave a very simple explanation of the show's groundbreaking format...
"Good evening, this is 60 Minutes. It's a kind of a magazine for television."
That first episode presented footage of 1968's presidential conventions, a piece on police
brutality, and a short film from Saul Bass titled "Why Man Creates." CBS was so unsure
if this new format - an hour used to tell multiple news stories - would work that 60
Minutes didn't even get to air every week. The show alternated its Tuesday-at-10 P.M.
timeslot with the more traditional CBS News Hour.
60 Minutes failed to place among even the top 50 most-watched TV shows of the season
and went similarly unnoticed for a few years until CBS moved it to 6 p.m. on Sunday evenings
in 1971.
In 1975, a rule change by the Federal Communications Commission gave the 7 o'clock hour, previously
belonging to local stations, back to the big broadcasters if they used the time for public
affairs or news shows. CBS put 60 Minutes in that spot, where it's remained ever since
as a ratings juggernaut.
The legacy and style of 60 Minutes is closely tied to Mike Wallace. One of the show's original
correspondents upon its debut in 1968, Wallace had previously worked as a newsman, as well
as an actor, announcer, game show host, and pitchman. He re-devoted himself to journalism
after his 19-year-old son, Peter, died in a mountain climbing accident. Wallace decided
to focus on doing what he felt would make Peter proud.
"I don't want to do commercials anymore. I would like to be a serious reporter."
Wallace quickly earned a reputation as one of the fiercest and most audacious broadcast
journalists. Before and during his decades with 60 Minutes, he was unafraid to ask hard
questions or even surprise his subjects with a camera crew when they least expected it,
which came to be known as an "ambush interview."
"How are you, sir?" "What is this?" "This is 60 minutes." "Wow."
Wallace got the Shah of Iran to admit to executing his political adversaries, asked assisted
suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian if he was, quote, "engaged in a political, medical, macabre
publicity venture," and nailed General William Westmoreland for failure to disclose pertinent
military information during the Vietnam War. And those are just a few highlights of his
extremely long and distinguished career. Around the time of his 88th birthday in 2006, Wallace
retired from his regular duties at 60 Minutes. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 93.
In 1983, 60 Minutes' Morley Safer filed an investigative piece that led to the exoneration
of a wrongfully convicted man.
The subject of this stunning report was Lenell Geter, an engineer sentenced to life in prison
for his role in a 1982 armed robbery of a Balch Springs, Texas, Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Safer and his team uncovered numerous inconsistencies and flaws in the local police's handling of
the case, suggesting that everything from poor detective work to racial bias led to
a wrongful arrest.
When a highly visible media outlet like 60 Minutes takes notice, other outlets do, too,
and so much attention was drawn to Geter's story that by December 1983, his case was
reopened. In March 1984, after he'd served more than a year in prison, a court ruled
that Geter was innocent and he was given back his freedom.
In a 2010 segment, 60 Minutes produced a feature on the modern-day equivalent of snake oil
salesmen - self-proclaimed experts selling phony, scam cures derived from stem cells
for a number of serious ailments, from cancer to autism to multiple sclerosis.
One of the episode's scam artists, Lawrence Stowe, ran Stowe Biotherapy in La Mesa, California.
Stowe, along with accomplice Francisco Morales, offered patients false hope in the form of
expensive, unproven, and untested stem cell treatments for their fatal or degenerative
medical conditions. 60 Minutes caught Stowe in the act of claiming he had the cures for
A.L.S., cancer, and other diseases. They also captured Stowe and Morales trying to scam
potential patients on hidden cameras - until they were interrupted by reporter Scott Pelley.
"Mr. Stowe, Mr. Morales. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm with 60 Minutes and I'd like to ask you
a few questions on the record about what you propose."
Pelley proceeded to ask the two men about their medical claims and gave them an opportunity
to explain their actions and clarify some of their promises to patients before he got
right to the point...
"You know, Mr. Stowe, the trouble is that you're a con man."
Federal investigations resulted after the 60 Minutes exposé, and Stowe was arrested.
He pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to sell misbranded and unapproved drugs and
was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison. His accomplice, Morales, received a five-year
sentence.
In 1978, broadcaster and essayist Andy Rooney was given a short recurring segment on the
show to offer his perspective on whatever seemed to be aggravating him that week.
"I don't know anything offhand that mystifies Americans more than the cotton they put in
pill bottles. Why do they do it?"
Topics were generally trivial, and Rooney would complain and comment about it for several
minutes. Initially a replacement for the debate feature "Point/Counterpoint" during summer
episodes, Rooney soon took over that segment's end-of-the-show spot as viewers loved hearing
him grumble about a large variety of nonsense.
"Somethings got to be done about phone books. You know something I don't like? Chocolate
chip cookies. Got a lot of paperweights. What's a paperweight for anyway?"
But as Rooney always spoke his mind, he'd occasionally make an extremely offensive and
controversial statement. In 1990, he made comments that suggested Black people were
less intelligent than other races and he was suspended for three months. That same year,
Rooney was suspended for three months again when he said that premature death resulted
from addiction, overeating, and, quote, "homosexual unions." After Rooney left the air, 60 Minutes
viewership dropped quickly and significantly. The show then brought back the commentator,
who apologized profusely.
After the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain by suicide in April 1994, Rooney was irritated
that the news drew more attention than the recent death of President Richard Nixon. Rooney
said that he doesn't understand people who believe, as he put it, "the nonsense about
how terrible life is." He also dismissed Cobain as a lazy man with, quote, "[a] drug-infested
life." A week later, Rooney apologized on the air and mentioned that he should have
considered Cobain's history of mental illness.
Lots of popular TV shows are made into big budget movies, but few people would have guessed
that 60 Minutes would get the big-screen treatment. The Insider, a 1999 Academy Award nominee
for Best Picture, is the dramatic retelling of one of the newsmagazine's messiest and
most scandalous moments.
In 1995, Jeffrey Wigand, a former researcher with tobacco company Brown & Williamson, who
was fired from his job helping to develop a safer cigarette, sat for an interview with
60 Minutes. Contrary to what seven tobacco company executives claimed in congressional
hearings, that the nicotine in cigarettes is non-addictive, Wigand said that his employer
knew for years that tobacco smoking was extremely detrimental to human health, and they'd stifled
and downplayed that information.
However, Wigand had signed a non-disclosure agreement with Brown & Williamson, which put
the 60 Minutes story into murky legal water. Anticipating a potential, multi-billion-dollar
lawsuit by Brown & Williamson, 60 Minutes producers' bosses at CBS ordered them to not
air the Wigand interview. After The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers reported on the
corporate interference that prevented 60 Minutes from exposing other corporate interference,
the show aired the story in full a week later.
"And while a lawsuit is still a possibility, not putting Jeffrey Wigand's story on 60 Minutes
no longer is."
Sometimes 60 Minutes doesn't just report the news. Sometimes it makes news itself when
it lands huge interviews with prominent public figures in the midst of controversy.
On January 26, 1992, millions remained tuned in after CBS's coverage of the Super Bowl
for a quickly-produced Steve Kroft interview with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and his
wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a special 10-minute edition of 60 Minutes. A former
television reporter and lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers told a tabloid that she'd
carried on a 12-year affair with the presidential primary candidate, and so Bill and Hillary
refuted the allegations on TV. The 60 Minutes interview rocketed both Clintons into the
public's consciousness and rescued their aspirations. Unfortunately, because of faulty lighting,
that same interview almost put a big dent in their future.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Ooh!"
As we all know, Bill Clinton went on to win the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.
While Hillary Rodham Clinton presaged her own political career and public life with
one of the most memorable lines from the 1992 interview...
"I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
Some of the other most-watched interviews from 60 Minutes include the 2008 sit-down
with President-elect Barack Obama and his spouse, Michelle Obama. Also, in 2018, Anderson
Cooper drew massive attention for his segment with adult film star Stormy Daniels, where
she discussed her alleged affair with Donald Trump.
The reporters of 60 Minutes often speak truth to power, but rarely have they been more engaged
in a feud with a sitting American president. In October 2020, the CBS News show prepared
an episode set to feature interviews with all four candidates from the two major party
tickets: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Correspondent Lesley Stahl's
sit-down with President Trump at the White House lasted about 45 minutes but the president
made it clear that he wasn't happy with the interview from the very beginning.
"Your first statement was 'Are you ready for tough questions?'" "Are you?" "That's no way
to talk. That's no way to talk."
Stahl corrected and fact-checked the president on a few occasions, telling him, quote, "you
know that's not true," after he boasted that he created the greatest economy in the history
of our country. She also pointed out that coronavirus infection rates were up in about
40 states after he said that his administration had done a great job with COVID. Finally,
an increasingly frustrated Trump stood up and walked out of the interview.
"I think we have enough of an interview here, Hope. Okay, that's enough. Let's go, let's
go."
Shortly after, as a way to scoop 60 Minutes, the Trump administration released unedited
video footage of the interview — recorded by a different crew at the White House for
official archival purposes. CBS went ahead and aired the 60 Minutes interview a few days
later.
A lot of factors are at play here, but the math doesn't lie: Technically, 60 Minutes
is probably the most successful American television show of all time. It's been on TV since 1968,
and since 1975, in virtually the same time slot. It's one of the longest-running programs
in primetime television history with 52 seasons thus far.
Since its entrenchment on Sunday evenings, 60 Minutes never fell lower than the top 10
in Nielsen's rankings for 23 consecutive seasons. Also, 60 Minutes was the overall number one
show on TV five times, a feat matched or surpassed by only All in the Family, The Cosby Show,
and American Idol.
Another quantifiable measure of success in television is awards. As of 2020, 60 Minutes
is the recipient of more than 130 Emmys Awards for television excellence — no show has
ever won more. The show offers such compelling storytelling that in 1979, 60 Minutes earned
a nomination for "Best Television Series: Drama" at the Golden Globe Awards. Amazingly,
it won.
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