The Man, the News Behind ’60 Minutes’

NBC has made “Dateline NBC” its transportable fast-food franchise, and ABC hopes to do the same with “20/20.”

So naturally there’s buzz at CBS for adding another night of charismatic “60 Minutes,” whose set of new faces possibly would include Bryant Gumbel, now that his own magazine series on that network appears on the rocks.

Throughout prime time, hours once automatically going to entertainment programs are now being considered as potential repositories for magazine series, whose relatively low costs and highly promotable topics--usually ripped from the headlines--give off an aroma of high profitability. The thinking: Throw another on the grill, and see if it sizzles.

With or without Gumbel, though, doubling “60 Minutes” is a ghastly idea, as Don Hewitt, the program’s outspoken creator and heavily hands-on executive producer, has noted in vigorously resisting it.

Adding another night of “Dateline NBC” is like opening another Wendy’s or McDonald’s. But even after three decades, “60 Minutes” remains not only extremely popular on Sunday nights (often ranking in the Nielsen Top 10) but also, more importantly, unique. Its thumbprint can’t be replicated, even though attempts to do so through the years have yielded a thick residue of magazine series whose present survivors range from ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” to “Hard Copy” and “Inside Edition.” And new ones are arriving on CNN and the Fox News Channel.

Each is a progeny of “60 Minutes,” but no chip off the block. Nor would be a second “60 Minutes”--its title and familiar ticking clock notwithstanding--given the improbability of the staff being able to do double duty. Or Hewitt even wanting to.

Above all, that singularity is the message Wednesday of a highly watchable, yet highly worshipful PBS documentary on the driven, incendiary Hewitt, long reputed to be the one person without whom “60 Minutes” could not function as “60 Minutes.” That impression is strengthened here.

And coming Sunday on CBS--its hook being the show’s 30th birthday--is “60 Minutes’ ” own loving serenade to itself, a two-hour retrospective of mostly highlights (and a few lows) from the mouths of correspondents and producers. Just as storytelling is the big, bold, looping signature of “60 Minutes,” so, too, are Hewitt and his colleagues adept at spinning fascinating anecdotes about the stories they’ve worked on.

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Ironically, “Don Hewitt: 90 Minutes on ’60 Minutes’ ” on PBS represents a long form of documentary all but extinct on the major commercial networks today, largely due to the very success of the newsmagazine genre that “60 Minutes” pioneered with segments that rarely extend beyond 13 minutes. When the wannabes followed suit, brevity became irrevocable.

Hewitt “may be responsible for shortening America’s attention span,” his wife, Marilyn, says on the PBS program, which is part of the “American Masters” series. And probably only half kidding, given his stated dislike of much contemporary TV reporting, Hewitt remarks that “60 Minutes” has “ruined television” by showing how profitable news could be. In the case of his own show, outrageously profitable.

The process that drives such earning power is not fully clarified by Susan Steinberg’s documentary. Her meager concession to numerous detractors of “60 Minutes”--which is sometimes accused of shaping stories to its own agenda or preconceptions--is a line saying the show is “not without its critics.” The documentary also offers little sense of the division of responsibilities between the show’s famous correspondents and its producers, or the strikingly different levels of involvement in stories by the correspondents.

Nor do you learn where “60 Minutes” ends and Hewitt begins. Perhaps the point is that no separation exists.

Steinberg is most successful when capturing behind-the-scenes activity at “60 Minutes,” which has evolved into a sort of hybrid of kids and codgers, with Mike Wallace and Hewitt topping the age pyramid. There Hewitt is on the phone getting Sunday’s overnight ratings (“10.8, that’s pretty bad. ‘Dateline’ got . . . what?”). There he is haggling aggressively with an equally stubborn Wallace over a story’s opening, a haggle that Hewitt wins. There is Wallace on the phone with Christiane Amanpour, whom “60 Minutes” shares with CNN, directing her to back off a piece on Algerian massacres that he wants for himself, showing just how growly the competition gets for stories inside “60 Minutes.”

And revisiting the darkest, stormiest episode in the life of “60 Minutes,” there is Hewitt being pressed by Steinberg about his failure to publicly resist CBS management’s 1995 quashing of an interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a former official of the giant Brown & Williamson tobacco company who had profoundly incriminating charges to make about his old employer.

CBS was then the property of Laurence Tisch, himself a tobacco company owner who was in the process of selling the network to Westinghouse. And driving this grim, embarrassing chapter of U.S. journalism, in addition to complex legalities, was fear of a lawsuit by Brown & Williamson that might have killed that sale.

Wallace was the correspondent on the tobacco piece, and producing it was Lowell Bergman, who tells Steinberg here that the word from Eric Ober, then president of CBS News, was that “the corporation will not risk its assets on this story.” And Wallace tells her that Hewitt “was on the company side.”

In contrast, Bergman and Wallace went public with their opposition.

“It was not my proudest moment,” admits Hewitt, adding that he wished he had “conducted myself as well as Mike and Lowell . . . did at the time.” (He sounds nearly as contrite when the subject arises more briefly during Sunday’s CBS News special on “60 Minutes.”)

After the Brown & Williamson story later broke in the Wall Street Journal, Bergman and Wallace were allowed to do a story on “60 Minutes” about their earlier reporting being aborted by CBS management. By that time, ownership of CBS had changed hands.

The critical issue of news operations bowing to corporate pressure has not been put to rest, though, and more tests may lie ahead. “The question,” Bergman tells the PBS producers, “is what is the next powerful public institution that requires some scrutiny, and what happens then?”

* “Don Hewitt: 90 Minutes on ’60 Minutes’ ” airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KCET-TV Channel 28. “60 Minutes at 30” airs at 7 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channel 2).