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By 1966 and 1967, I was already starting to think about a new type of personal journalism. The documentaries—CBS Reports, NBC White Paper and ABC Close Up—all seemed to be the voice of the corporation and I didn't believe people were interested in hearing from a corporation. They were like newspaper editorials, I thought. Do people really care about the "voice of the newspaper"? They want to read the reporting and the columnists, not the editorials.There was the one-hour format for what amounted to the long form in broadcast journalism, and an hour seemed too long do for the personal journalism that was beginning to form in my mind—journalism that might be both compelling and entertaining. Entertaining? Wasn't that a dirty word when used in connection with the news? Not to me. I had entered the television age in the era of news as a public service and spent my TV adolescence serving that cause. But I had begun to realize in the '60s that TV news was going to have to pay its own way. Otherwise, it was going to disappear into the sink hole called The Sunday Afternoon Ghetto, where documentaries and discussion shows could do no harm to the Jackie Gleasons and Lucille Balls that paid the bills and made CBS Television the entertainment conglomerate it had become. At the same time, Ed Murrow was beginning to realize the same thing--that his and Fred Friendly's See It Now program was not getting the respect from the corporate brass they thought it deserved and that in some markets it was being preempted by Amos 'n Andy. What to do about it? The only way Murrow could give them a show that could hold its own against the best the other networks could throw at it would be to get into the ratings game—a game he had roundly condemned as beneath serious journalists. But if he was going to please the corporation—and that was something he knew quite a bit about because he was a member of the CBS hierarchy for a while—it meant playing the game. Going with the flow was what it was, but it was the only way to "make it" with the people he worked for and the only way to put the kind of money in his pocket that would take care of his wife Janet and his son Casey after he was gone. The broadcast he agreed to do was called Person to Person, and it concerned itself each week with visiting the homes of famous people. We who worked on Ed's prestigious Sunday afternoon broadcast, See It Now, soon saw the public gravitating to Person to Person in the kind of numbers that frequently put it in the top ten while we languished in the cellar. It was John Horne, the TV critic of the New York Herald Tribune, who coined the phrases "high Murrow" and "low Murrow" to distinguish between the two broadcasts. Oh my God, I thought. That's the answer. Why not put them both together in one broadcast and reap the benefits of being both prestigious and popular? For the first time, there could be a way for a television show to feed the network's soul and, simultaneously, its pocketbook. We could look into Marilyn Monroe's closet so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer's laboratory, too. We could make the news entertaining without compromising our integrity. That, in essence, was the genesis of 60 Minutes. |
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PAPERBACKISBN 978-1-58648-141-4 Pub date: 09/12/02 Price: $15.00/22.95 Canada 5-1/2 X 8-1/4 288 pages Media Studies, Memoir Selling Territory: WORLD Pub history: PublicAffairs hc
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