1968 was one of the 20th century’s most pivotal years. In January, the United States was knocked on its heels by the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a massive attack by the Hanoi-directed Viet Cong guerilla army.
Though a military failure, it brought home to America that the war was unwinnable. For a people long accustomed to military victory, such an outcome was almost unthinkable, even as it was televised in bloody detail.
Later in the year, Americans would be shocked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, and they also would be subjected to a speech by their incumbent president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in which he would inform them of the unheard-of news that he would not be seeking reelection to the Oval Office.
American television screens would project images of rioting and ruin in Chicago as it hosted the Democratic National Convention, where Hubert Humphrey was nominated by the fractured Democrats to replace his boss, Johnson.
On and on it went that year. Paris burned as student protesters took to the streets, while Soviet tanks brought an end to the Prague Spring – the first sustained effort by Eastern Europeans to shuck off the yoke of Moscow since the failed Hungarian Uprising of 1956. NASA sent another probe to the Moon, and the Beatles released their album “Magical Mystery Tour.” In July, the PLO hijacked its first El Al plane, and a few days later, Pope Paul VI declared any artificial forms of birth control to be prohibited by the Catholic Church. In the fall, Star Trek featured the first interracial kiss aired on TV, then in November, Richard Nixon was elected president.
All-in-all, it was a dizzying year of rapid change for an America not quite used to many of the ideas behind it and suspicious of the social forces driving it. Civil rights, black power, female liberation, youth protests, a grinding guerrilla war in Southeast Asia, fantastical technological change – it was a lot to take in. But in September of that same year, a new type of TV program aired, hoping to explain it all in ways the average American could understand. That show was “60 Minutes.”
Described by one of its founding hosts as “a type of newsmagazine for television,” “60 Minutes” would go on to pioneer the genre. Every other week, then weekly as the show gained in popularity and prestige, the show’s crack reporters would bring issues and newsmakers directly into American homes, while its hosts and correspondents would pioneer new forms of journalism created specially for a television audience.
Among the new forms was “gotcha” journalism, wherein a CBS journalist would stalk a public ne’er-do-well on the street and pelt them with usually unanswered pointed questions about their ethical lapses.
Equally wonderful were the tough, on-camera interviews by Mike Wallace, who could make even dictators squirm as he asked probing questions under the glare of the network’s cameras and klieg lights. Wallace became so famous for these excruciatingly delightful interviews that he was commemorated in a Far Side cartoon entitled, “Mike Wallace Interviews the Devil,” wherein the Prince of Darkness announces an end to the interview after admonishing Wallace for bringing up “that whole plague thing.”
In its heyday, “60 Minutes” was a wonderful thing for people scattered across America thirsting for a deeper understanding of the world around them. It proved so popular that it would spawn a whole series of imitators on other networks. None, however, would ever approach the prestige and gravitas of the show that started it all, and which continues more or less the same to this very day.
“60 Minutes” is now such an American cultural institution that even if you’ve never watched it or never cared about the issues it covers, you’ve nonetheless heard about it through cultural osmosis. It is the longest, continually-airing television show of any kind ever to appear on American television.
These days, however, the reputation of the Tiffany Network’s flagship newsmagazine has grown a bit tarnished. In the past six months, the show has suffered from a string of what can only be described as colossal journalistic failures that have greatly diminished the golden aura that once surrounded everything about the show. While “60 Minutes” has had problems with its coverage before, the sheer magnitude of the recent issues to mar the good name of what is arguably America’s most important news program have come so quickly that it raises important questions not just about the show, but American TV journalism itself.
The first major failure aired in late October. It was a piece on the Benghazi hoax, a thoroughly debunked scandal cooked up by enemies of the Obama administration to smear the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Believers of the Benghazi myth allege that, somehow, Obama and Clinton improperly spun initial reports on the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012 – a month before that year’s presidential election – for political purposes. At worst, believers in the Benghazi scandal claim, the administration was criminally negligent or even deliberately responsible for the deaths that occurred, including that of the U.S. ambassador.
These allegations, however, have the inconvenient attribute of not being true. As a recent investigation by the New York Times shows, the attack was a result of a complex interplay of factors, and any initially incorrect reports on it from the administration were either overblown by administration enemies or otherwise naturally occurred due to the chaotic nature of the event itself. Confusion, not conspiracy, reigned. There was, very simply, no pre-election plot by the White House aimed at misleading the American public about the attack, or at least, there has been no hard evidence put before the American people that clearly and objectively points in that direction.
“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan, however, did not acknowledge that fact. Instead, she put on the air a known liar with little or no vetting who subsequently told a story about the attack that was completely at odds with what he told the FBI. Moreover, information about this inconsistency was available at the time, which meant Logan and “60 Minutes” either didn’t bother to give journalistic due diligence necessary for a story like this or did so and didn’t care about the fact that she was putting such a poor source on the air for all America to see and hear. Well, America did see and hear, and the resulting firestorm forced “60 Minutes” to air an apology and correction and put Logan on an indefinite suspension from which she has not yet returned.
The second journalistic bomb came a few months later. In early January, a piece by Lesley Stahl aired on the so-called “The Cleantech Crash.” In it, Stahl and CBS allege that the federal government’s various clean-energy programs aimed at promoting renewable energy in America have largely failed, resulting in billions of taxpayer dollars lost.
“Instead of breakthroughs, the sector suffered a string of expensive tax-funded flops,” Stahl reported, offering a damning indictment of one the Democrats’ most cherished economic initiatives.
As in CBS’s sloppy Benghazi reporting, Stahl’s story on clean energy was more a hit piece than a work of respectable journalism. While it is true that some companies – most notably, Solyndra – have failed despite receiving taxpayer dollars, and that some economic subsidies, like those for ethanol, are misguided, the idea that the clean energy sector is an overall flop or a waste of effort is so wrong as to be ludicrous.
In fact, the industry is a phenomenal success. The price per kilowatt hour for solar panels had plummeted, approaching grid parity in sunny climates, while wind energy is largely competitive with more traditional energy providers such as coal and nuclear energy.
What’s more, so successful have renewables become in penetrating consumer and commercial energy markets long dominated by traditional fossil fuel-dependent utilities that these companies are running scared and fighting tooth and nail to stop the clean energy revolution dead in its tracks via government regulation. All this, of course, was ignored in Stahl’s slapdash hit job, and clean-energy entrepreneurs and knowledgeable energy reporters took her piece to the woodshed. There are problems in the industry, sure, but ignoring the wider success the clean-energy industry has achieved does an immense disservice to the viewing public. And quite frankly, it suggests a partisan agenda.
To top it all off, “60 Minutes” ran a truly abysmal piece in February by correspondent David Martin on Lockheed Martin’s trillion-dollar war plane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. While admitting that the military’s new wonder plane was over budget and behind schedule – “What Pentagon program isn’t?” one might ask – the piece nonetheless indicated that the plane had wide support and was needed due to new threats faced by America’s global adversaries. Unfortunately, as critics have pointed out, not a single critic of the plane, which is beset by a huge number of seemingly irreconcilable technical problems, was interviewed, even though prominent figures like Arizona Sen. John McCain have been deeply critical of the F-35 program.
More problematic is that every person interviewed was either employed by the federal government or Lockheed Martin, or otherwise stood to gain from the F-35 being pushed through the military procurement process. The piece had, in other words, all the trappings of a corporate PR effort aimed at protecting the fat bottom line of the world’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, instead of serving the interests of the public or national security. Indeed, some critics have even gone so far as to call the “60 Minutes” story on the F-35 little more than a brochure for gullible buyers as opposed to a responsible piece of defense industry journalism.
So, in short order we have seen a string of failures to give basic due diligence at “60 Minutes” that would have gotten its producers an F at any respectable journalism school in the country, but the show remains the biggest name in American TV news. What gives? How did such a famous and prestigious program, the crown jewel of broadcast journalism, fall so far, so fast? While only those calling the shots at CBS can truly know the answer, we can sum up our guess in one word: demographics.
TV news today is a famously competitive business, but not too long ago, that wasn’t the case. In the past, the big three networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – ran their broadcast news departments at a loss as a public service and for corporate prestige. Monopoly profits from being the only three national TV networks could fund such vanity journalism because, like the medieval lords of old who were patrons of the arts, they could afford to do it and they did so out of a sense of noblesse oblige. It was, however, work premised on those big-three broadcast monopolies always being in place and the journalists not rocking the boat too much.
The breakdown of that monopoly, which began in the late 1980s and has continued apace via the entry of new firms and technologies into the news marketplace, led the networks to bleed viewers and forced broadcast journalism to become profitable in a new media environment featuring a host of new players. In this battle for ratings — and as in all wars — truth was the first casualty. The “news” soon took on a more and more carnivalesque, partisan, opinion-orientated atmosphere that corrupted the fact-based, “straight” reporting of yesteryear. In the space of a generation, competition forced the networks and their news departments to look, feel, act and think like the satirical 1976 movie “Network” — a film depressingly prophetic in its depiction of what was to become of American broadcast journalism.
In today’s new media environment, CBS – like the struggling UBS in “Network” – is facing the grim fact that its viewers are old, dwindling and lost to the less objectively-minded Fox News, to put it charitably. To stem the loss, CBS and its news department have likely decided to follow the leader, Fox, by shoring up its viewership base amongst the conservative white elderly population. In 2008, for instance, CBS hired a 12-year veteran of Fox News to head its news department. Reporter Lara Logan, herself, is a known pro-war, anti-Islamist hawk who, a month prior to the airing of the Benghazi piece, gave a public speech in which she questioned the administration’s truthfulness on the matter.
Combine this with the fact that the person interviewed by Logan in the infamous Benghazi piece also had a book deal with CBS-owned Simon & Schuster, and suddenly the air surrounding the grand old dame of TV news doesn’t smell so sweet. Indeed, it smells more than a little rotten and reeks of a desperation to hold the attention of conservative viewers long-since converted into Fox News devotees just long enough to turn their eyeballs into advertising dollars, no matter the consequences. This is speculation, of course, but given that “60 Minutes” aired three scandalously bad red-meat pieces guaranteed to salivate the chops of the most ardent hater of liberals, it is perhaps justified.
After all, journalistic flubs can be written off as a fluke of incompetence if they happen once or twice. But three times or more? That’s a pattern. Which is why, paradoxically, CBS and “60 Minutes” bear watching, even if it’s only to catch them at it again and so fill out the emerging pattern of right-wing bias at what had once been the journalistic home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
Watching corruption and decay play out on air in real time should be a rarity, but with “60 Minutes,” it looks like we’ll catch more and more glimpses of it one hour-long episode at a time.