On September 24, 1968, the first edition of 60 Minutes went out on CBS, with Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner as the two correspondents and Don Hewitt as the producer. It was on at 10 in the evening on Tuesdays, alternating with other CBS news programmes, and it was not expected to last. The first broadcast had a segment on Richard Nixon's campaign, one on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and one on capital punishment.
The format was Hewitt's and it was simple: three pieces, each a self-contained magazine story with a reporter who was on camera and whose personality was part of the programme, and a closing commentary delivered to camera. The pieces ran fourteen minutes. The correspondents were not anchors reading copy; they were the people who had done the reporting, and they were on screen because of it.
What made it work was confrontation as a method. Mike Wallace, who was 50 and had been through quiz shows, tabloid television and an early version of this very programme, had a style that involved asking the question the subject did not want asked and then not moving. He was good at it and he was attacked for it, and the programme's defenders said that the editing and the ambush interview were the price of asking anything of anyone.
It took seven years to find its audience. CBS put it in a regular weekly slot in 1975, on Sundays at seven, and it has been there almost ever since. It reached number one in the ratings in the 1979-80 season and has been in the top ten in most years since, which is remarkable for a news programme and has made it by a wide margin the most profitable show in television.
The reporting has produced consequences, which is the reason any of this matters. 60 Minutes ran the story on Agent Orange exposure in 1978, the Pentagon Papers and the Ellsberg break-in, the My Lai allegations after they had been suppressed, and the tobacco industry's internal documents in the 1990s. It has also been wrong and has had to retract: the 1997 segment on the firing of a tobacco executive was based on a source who lied, and the 2004 story on George W. Bush's National Guard service used documents that could not be authenticated.
The programme is still broadcast, in its 57th season. Hewitt died in 2009. Wallace retired in 2006. He died in 2012. Morley Safer, who joined in 1970, worked on it for 46 years. The format has been copied in almost every country with a television industry, and the closing commentary, which was Andy Rooney's from 1979 to 2011, is the part that has been imitated least successfully.