60 Minutes

60 MINUTES

First Television Newsmagazine

The first television newsmagazine show, 60 Minutes, premiered on CBS on 24 September 1968 as a bimonthly program in the Tuesday night at 10 P.M. slot. Its cohosts during its first years were veteran news reporters Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace. The 60 Minutes format was the brainchild of CBS Evening News producer Don Hewitt, who saw the program as a "Life magazine of the air." Each hour-long show was divided into three twenty-minute segments, two handled by Wallace and one by Reasoner.

The Interview

The interview subject was the primary segment type, with Wallace and Reasoner featuring during the first year talks with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, French-German student radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Attorney General John Mitchell, rock singer Janis Joplin, Supreme Court nominee Clement Haynsworth, and My Lai massacre participants Pvt. Paul Meadlo and Capt. Ernest Medina. Some of the segments were criticized as puff pieces, but others, including the show investigating My Lai, were hailed as television journalism at its best. More important, 60 Minutes showed the networks that news could be packaged as entertainment and sold to advertisers and the public.

The Decline of the Documentary

The newsmagazine helped spell the end of the news documentary, a genre of show that was expensive to produce and not popular with viewers or advertisers. The success of 60 Minutes was not lost on the other networks, particularly NBC, which introduced First Tuesday, a two-hour monthly newsmagazine hosted by Sander Vanocur, in January 1969. First Tuesday was ultimately a failure, as were most competing newsmagazine shows until the premiere of 20/20 on ABC in the late 1970s.

Dominance of the Newsmagazine

The effects of the success of 60 Minutes —the show was finally moved to 7:00 P.M. on Sundays in 1975—were not clear until the 1990s, when newsmagazines were an increasingly dominant programming format; in 1994 there were no fewer than ten prime-time newsmagazine shows broadcast by the three traditional networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS. The blurring of news and entertainment became a more controversial subject as news budgets were slashed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and much of the reputation for news gathering was taken by new outlets such as Cable News Network (CNN). While much of that shift was because of technology, the demands of viewers and the effects of programming shifts—some exemplified by 60 Minutes —also had an important effect.

Sources:

Richard Campbell, 60 Minutes and the News: A Mythology for Middle
America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991);

"Cloaking Pitfalls in Smiles," Time, 93 (10 January 1969): 39;

"The Mellowing of Mike Malice," Time, 95 (19 January 1970): 57;

"Merry Magazines," Time, 93 (11 April 1969): 86.