Still, some network officials argued that anything coming from the elusive convicted Watergate conspirator was potentially newsworthy, and CBS announced that “H. R. Haldeman has granted Mike Wallace an extensive, exclusive interview.” Executives at the other networks were shocked by the news of CBS’s exclusive. Haldeman’s lawyer had also approached them, and they knew that he was only willing to talk for a fee. CBS News’s much-touted policy, laid forth in its carefully drafted News Standards Outline, strictly forbade the network from paying news sources. The so-called Tiffany network had violated its own standards, and other news organizations were quick to attack the network that so often sneered at them.
“Paying is the second issue,” said Reuven Frank, the former president of NBC news. “The first is whether a man like Haldeman should be given a platform, knowing full well that he will try to manipulate the medium.”
The episode sparked a debate on checkbook journalism. “The competition for exclusive news between networks or between newspapers has always been keen and often savage, but usually the prize has gone to the side with the best legs, brains and imagination,” James Reston wrote in the New York Times. “If CBS will pay this kind of money for Mr. Haldeman, won’t other big shots or notorious characters demand their price?” Paid sources, one of the arguments went, were little more than performers. The whole issue of “checkbook journalism” blurred the all-important distinction between news and entertainment.
Embarrassed CBS officials insisted they had stayed within the boundaries of network guidelines. The network’s policy permitted the payment of fees to newsworthy people for their “memoirs.” CBS had paid “honorariums” to both Lyndon Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower for their televised memoirs. That’s what this was, CBS News president Richard Salant insisted, Haldeman’s memoirs of his years at the White House. To further prove that point, CBS announced that the Haldeman interview would not run on 60 Minutes—because it was a news show. It would run as a two-part special: “Haldeman: The Nixon Years—Conversations with Mike Wallace.”
No one bought it. The Haldeman segments had been produced by 60 Minutes staffers, using their equipment and their offices, and the interview was running in the 60 Minutes time slot. “CBS was flat out wrong on this,” said ABC News president William Sheehan. It was, he said, “an outright buy of a news exclusive.”
Indeed, the whole issue of checkbook journalism might have been forgiven outside the small circle of journalists who debate this sort of thing—if CBS had delivered the goods. But when the show was broadcast March 23 and 30, both the critics and the public were outraged.
“Mr. Haldeman was paid for the privilege of staunchly arguing his innocence on an invaluable national forum,” one reviewer wrote.
“Liddy’s fanaticism was fascinating,” noted another critic. “Haldeman’s impersonation of a Boy Scout was not.”
“Bob Haldeman is no more innocent than I am,” John Dean wrote in the New York Times. The former White House Counsel, who had pled guilty for his role in the Watergate cover-up, piously noted that the Times did not pay him for writing the review.
Wallace was especially stung by Dean’s criticism. He claimed that Dean was upset because 60 Minutes had turned down an offer to pay him for an interview six weeks earlier. “I didn’t think he had anything to say that was worth the money,” said Wallace. He scrambled to distance himself from the mess. “Let me make it clear that I had nothing to do with the negotiations,” Wallace protested. “I was presented with a fait accompli. I’m paid to do this kind of work. I was presented with a chore.”
CBS admitted that it may have made a mistake. “I’m going to reexamine the whole question,” Salant said. “I may have slipped here.” The real crisis over the Haldeman interview, however, was that it was a snooze. Although 60 Minutes promised it would never again pay for an interview, it did on several occasions. It was just careful never again to pay for such a boring interview.
Although neither its producers nor its reporters would ever admit it, the legendary 60 Minutes, which achieved its great success at the same time that the National Enquirer became the most widely read magazine in the country, employed many of the same disingenuous and arguably unethical tactics as the Enquirer. In fact, the story of the rise of 60 Minutes illustrates how television adopted the techniques pioneered by the Enquirer, with much the same commercial results, a development that paved the way for the “tabloidization” of television in the eighties and nineties. Geraldo Rivera’s true godfather is Don Hewitt.
Hewitt had long been the bad boy of TV news. He was a wunderkind and an enfant terrible who joined CBS in 1948—the year that the number of television sets in the country jumped from 15,000 to 190,000. Except for the time that he predicted that Barbara Walters would never make it as a newscaster, Hewitt had an almost uncanny knowledge of what would work in television. He produced the televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy, he worked for famed newsman Edward R. Murrow, and he soon became executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Hewitt, however, was given to gimmicks and stunts. Once, for example, while trying to report a story in Texas, Hewitt disguised himself as a sheriff to find out a competitor’s coverage plans. On another occasion, he beat NBC’s story on Winston Churchill’s funeral by calling the airline carrying NBC’s tape and pretending to be with NBC. “Don’t take off,” Hewitt told the Royal Canadian Air Force. “There’s more videotape on the way.” On another occasion, he encouraged prisoners in a New Jersey jail to resume a riot so he could get good footage of the uprising. The escapade that really got Hewitt in trouble, however, occurred during the 1964 convention, when he stole an NBC producer’s confidential handbook detailing the network’s plans for coverage. Hewitt was fired from Cronkite’s show and was put in charge of CBS’s documentaries.
Hewitt loathed the assignment. Though he could become so giddy over a good story that he would literally jump up and down in glee, he openly admitted that he was bored by most news and liked to boast that he had the shortest attention span in the television industry. The earnestly ponderous news documentaries CBS produced at the time hopelessly bored him. “I hate the word documentary,” he declared. “No one wants to read a document, for God’s sake. Who wants to watch a documentary?”
Hewitt found very few ideas that he thought deserved an hour-long show, the standard length for CBS documentaries at the time. He also thought that news documentaries could be more entertaining if they were packaged differently. “Bill Moyers did a thing called ‘CBS Reports: Illegal Aliens.’ It was great,” he said, “but it should have been called ‘The Gonzales Brothers,’ and the ads should have shown the immigration service chasing two wetbacks through the back alleys of Los Angeles.”
In 1968, Hewitt came up with the idea of using the magazine format in television—mixing in three or four “articles” on a variety of topics: politics, show business, crime. These pieces would, like the magazine articles after which they were fashioned, employ texture, conflict, a strong point of view, and the struggle between good and evil. They would not only have drama, they would be dramas. And furthermore, Hewitt thought, it would be important to position the newscasters as characters in a drama. “It’s very much a question of marketing in this business,” Hewitt said. “I told [CBS news head Richard] Salant that if we packaged this show like Hollywood and centered it around personalities, I’d bet we could double the documentary audience.”
Not everyone welcomed his idea. “Entertainment under the guise of news,” Salant objected. “I thought the idea was terrible.” Nevertheless, Hewitt persuaded CBS executives to give his show a shot.
For his star reporter, Hewitt brought on Mike Wallace. The man who had pioneered tabloid television before leaving ABC in 1958 had floundered professionally for several years. He hosted game shows, conducted fluffy celebrity interviews for a show called PM, filmed toilet bowl cleaner commercials, and became a pitchman for Parliament cigarettes. Then, in 1962, Wallace went l
ooking for his son Peter, who had disappeared while on a camping trip in Greece. He discovered his son’s body off the side of a cliff, where he had fallen. Devastated, Wallace reevaluated his own life. He decided he wanted to get back into journalism, but almost no news organization would have him. Wallace was tainted by show business and commercialism. Finally, in March 1963, he accepted a huge cut in pay to become an anchor at a local TV station in Los Angeles. Word had spread that a redemptive Wallace—so eager to cleanse his commercialized past—had offered to buy up all the Parliament ads he had appeared in. The rumor wasn’t true, but it so impressed CBS news head Dick Salant that he reconsidered his decision about Wallace. Salant hired Wallace to try to rescue the ever-stumbling CBS Morning News, which was getting beaten badly by NBC’s Today Show with Barbara Walters.
At age forty-five, Wallace was being given another chance, but not everyone welcomed him. Harry Reasoner looked at the former game show host “like I was a hair in his soup” Wallace later recalled. “We were all quite contemptuous,” CBS writer Joan Snyder said. “Why on earth, we wondered, had this sleazy Madison Avenue pitchman been chosen to anchor a CBS News broadcast? I would have preferred Johnny, the Philip Morris bellhop.” Wallace worked hard to prove himself, clocking in long hours, yelling at writers and producers when their work was below par—frequently dismissing bad copy or uninspired ideas as “baby shit.”
Wallace left the CBS Morning News—it was not a good fit, especially after the time was moved up to 7 A.M. and the perennial night owl found the hours difficult. He became a field correspondent, and CBS was trying to figure out what to do with Wallace when Hewitt decided he was an ideal character for the new show 60 Minutes.
When 60 Minutes debuted on September 24, 1968, it was a bomb, ranking dead last of the seventy-two shows in prime time. Hewitt tinkered with the formula. He tried devoting the program to a single topic, with Harry Reasoner being positive and upbeat about the subject while Mike Wallace took a negative point of view, but that only confused viewers. Hewitt even briefly tried adding cartoons. Nothing worked. At the same time, CBS’s programmers kept moving the show to various time slots—in its first three years, the show was broadcast on Mondays at ten P.M., Tuesdays at ten, Thursdays at eight, and Fridays at eight, but it was clobbered by entertainment shows like the popular Marcus Welby. To make matters worse, in the midst of all this shuffling Reasoner was hired away by ABC.
In 1971, 60 Minutes was moved to Sunday at 6 P.M. It was considered a deadly time slot, but up against local news on other networks, its ratings improved slightly. What’s more important, Hewitt had further honed his formula for the program. Just as the magazines sold at newsstands had to be saucier and more sensational than the ones delivered through subscription, Hewitt’s TV news magazine had to be more aggressive than the evening news, which had a built-in audience. Like the Enquirer, it needed to shock, to scandalize, to titillate. One segment showed well-known liberal supporters of busing sending their children to private schools. An interview with fugitive Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver elicited a government subpoena for the program’s film and notes. Hewitt by then was mixing celebrity profiles in with the serious news segments. In one broadcast, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton bantered about his “pockmarks” and her “slightly fat belly.” In another, Barbra Streisand, under questioning by Mike Wallace, broke down in tears.
Hewitt also started employing some of the more controversial tactics that are associated with tabloid journalism: ambush interviews and, especially, checkbook journalism. CBS news has repeatedly denied that it practices checkbook journalism, but 60 Minutes has frequently paid for hot stories. A year after CBS paid Haldeman $100,000 to sit down for an interview, an ex-con claiming to know the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body demanded $10,000 in cash for the information. Amazingly, CBS News drew out ten $1,000 bills in order to buy the far-fetched Hoffa tale. The story didn’t materialize and the informant absconded with the cash without leading the CBS news crew to Hoffa. The informant, Chuck Medlin, was later apprehended in a New Orleans hotel where he was playing poker with what was left of CBS’s money. Medlin had tried to sell the Hoffa story to several local papers, but they had all taken a pass. “He was obviously a nut,” said Charlotte Hays, a former reporter with Figaro, a small New Orleans weekly who spoke with him. “We got rid of him as soon as possible. He called us cowards and all sorts of other names and told us he’d be at the local Holiday Inn in case we changed our minds.” The editor of Figaro contacted officials and told them where Medlin was staying. When the FBI burst in on Medlin, he was sitting on the floor of his hotel room, playing cards with an Arab seaman and a black hooker. Medlin handed over what was left of CBS’s money: $3,100 that he had stashed under the rug. Hewitt and CBS declined to press charges against the fraudulent informant. The debacle was hugely embarrassing to the network; still, it didn’t dissuade the 60 Minutes team from whipping out the checkbook for stories. The program simply became more discreet about how the money made its way to the subject.
One way it would do this was to pay an “intermediary” who was then free to pass along a percent of the fee to the source. In 1981, for example, 60 Minutes paid $10,000 to two fugitive gun runners, Frank E. Terpil and George Gregary Korkala. CBS insisted that it would never pay criminals for news, but admitted paying $12,000 to an “intermediary” whom network officials refused to identify. And in 1984, 60 Minutes paid $500,000 for an interview with Richard Nixon. That money didn’t go directly to Nixon; rather, it went to a former aide, Frank Gannon, who coincidentally had dated CBS correspondent Diane Sawyer. Gannon did the actual interviewing and then paid Nixon. And CBS News has repeatedly offered newspaper reporters nationwide “finders’ fees” of $500 to $1,000 for tips leading to stories that make it onto 60 Minutes. The show sometimes pays a source a “consultant” fee as it did “consultant” Jeffrey Wigand in its 1995 Brown & Williamson tobacco story.
Payments to its sources was only one of the troubling ways that 60 Minutes gathered news. To heighten the drama in his pieces, Hewitt encouraged his correspondents to adopt a confrontational style. Balanced news, he felt, seldom made for entertaining, compelling, theatrical stories. “Tell me a story!” Hewitt used to insist. “Each segment has to be its own little morality play.” While the tactics produced money-making episodes, the critics who felt that they violated journalistic standards of fairness and objectivity included CBS’s own Walter Cronkite, who told the New York Times, “The confrontational form that sometimes produces more heat than light, I quarrel with. It is not my style. Some of the camera techniques bother me. The extreme close-up would make almost anybody look guilty. Under the hot lights perspiring, the slightest eye movement appears to be furtive.”
Hewitt and his correspondents ignored such complaints. Instead of reforming their tactics, they devised elaborate new methods of staging interviews and manipulating their “news magazine” stories for dramatic effect. In one favorite ploy, 60 Minutes crews would bring only one camera to interviews, which meant that instead of shooting the correspondent and the subject simultaneously they had to film the interview in two “takes.” In the first take the camera remained on the subject, and then when the interview was over the camera would be turned to the correspondent who would then be filmed reasking the questions. Often, the correspondent would first ask the questions in a very friendly manner, lulling the subject into thinking the interview was sympathetic, only to use a very different tone, one frequently expressing shock, dismay, or surprise, when asking the questions the second time around. “I was very surprised to note that they seemed to care as much about the question as the answers,” said the writer Jerzy Kosinksi, who was once interviewed by Mike Wallace for a segment on the director Roman Polanski. “I noticed it after the interview was over, when they turned the cameras around to film Mike reasking the questions. The process is very studied and very precise: He assumed an expression that was at once that of a man who knows and a boy who wants to find out, a fascinating
mixture of the inquisitive and the inquisitional.”
Wallace, whose background was in acting, was the preeminent practitioner of this technique. In 1976 he interviewed Gene Pope and the National Enquirer’s editor Iain Calder for a segment on the tabloid. During the interview, Wallace first posed his questions in a friendly manner and then in the second taping adopted an accusatory tone. When Pope later complained about the unfairness, Wallace unapologetically replied, “Gene Pope was present, right?” Wallace asked. “Then he should have interrupted.” The story adopted a tone of moral indignation over what it claimed was the tabloid’s practice of printing falsehoods, and to prove its point, it disputed an Enquirer report that Walter Cronkite earned $750,000 a year by airing a tape of the anchorman saying, “That’s not the way it is. Not even close! Not half that!” In fact, Cronkite had a base salary of $650,000 and also received perks and three months of paid vacation that valued his total compensation at $750,000. Then to discredit a story the tabloid had run about a hot romance between Raquel Welch and Freddie Prinze, 60 Minutes had footage of Rona Barrett disputing the story. “Everything they wrote is totally false,” said Barrett. “They are totally made up quotes. So said Raquel Welch to me!”
Before taping interviews, Wallace would sometimes cozy up to subjects off camera, making them think they were friends, joking or sympathizing with their plight, luring them into a false sense of security, hoping to get them to say something off guard on camera. Once in a while, however, the ploy backfired. In 1981 Wallace was preparing a segment on whether the San Diego Federal Savings and Loan was making loans to low-income families, especially poorly educated minorities, who couldn’t afford to repay the loans. Wallace was interviewing a bank officer named Richard Carlson, and during a break in filming, Wallace started kidding around with Carlson about how complicated the loan forms were. “You bet your ass they are hard to read,” Wallace said to Carlson, “if you’re reading them over watermelon or over tacos.” Although 60 Minutes cameras weren’t rolling, the bank had set up its own cameras. Wallace, who thought the bank’s cameras were off, was furious.
Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip Page 12