NONFICTION - Aug. 25, 1991

60 MINUTES AND THE NEWS: A Mythology for Middle America by Richard Campbell (University of Illinois Press: $29.95; 240 pp.) When Richard Campbell, a communications professor at the University of Michigan, first tells us that “60 Minutes”--the inherently adversarial “newsmagazine” which rode to the top of TV ratings on the tidal wave of cynicism that swept the country after Watergate--is a stalwart defender of the status quo, our first thought is that he must be another tenured radical bearing a grudge from the ‘60s. After reading this meticulously close study of 100 “60 Minutes” shows over 22 years, however, we begin to see clearly that the show simplifies and dramatizes a complex world by subscribing to a set of “mythologies”; e.g., facts are “transparent and unambiguous” and, as Morley Safer once put it, every story has “one sweetheart and one son-of-a-bitch.” Refreshingly, though, Campbell is not simplistically faulting this distortion. His use of the word “myth” might appear derisive, but he is ultimately grateful not only that the show gives his grandmother “characters to yell at” but also that it provides all of us with the kind of shared knowledge we need “to live together in a contemporary yet contradictory democracy. . . . For me, ’60 Minutes,’ more than any other show on TV, explains the opening line of Joan Didion’s ‘White Album’: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ ”