Read an Excerpt from 'Tell Me a Story'

April 3 -- The following excerpt comes from Tell Me A Story: 50 Years and 60 Minutes.

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60 Minutes of Prime Time

By 1966 and 1967, I was already starting to think about a new type ofpersonal journalism. The documentaries — CBS Reports, NBCWhite Paper, and ABC Close Up — all seemed to be the voice of thecorporation, and I didn't believe people were interested in hearingfrom a corporation. They were like newspaper editorials, I thought.Do people really care about the "voice of the newspaper"? Theywant to read the reporting and the columnists, not the editorials.There was the one-hour format for what amounted to the longform in broadcast journalism, and an hour seemed too long for thepersonal journalism that was beginning to form in my mind — journalismthat might be both compelling and entertaining.

Entertaining? Wasn't that a dirty word when used in connectionwith the news? Not to me.

I had entered the television age in the era of news as a publicservice and spent my TV adolescence serving that cause. But I hadbegun to realize in the '60s that TV news was going to have to pay itsown way. Otherwise, it was going to disappear into the sinkholecalled The Sunday Afternoon Ghetto, where documentaries anddiscussion shows could do no harm to the Jackie Gleasons andLucille Balls who paid the bills and made CBS Television the entertainmentconglomerate it had become.

At the same time, Ed Murrow was beginning to realize the samething — that his and Fred Friendly's See It Now program was not get-tingthe respect from the corporate brass they thought it deservedand that in some markets it was being preempted by Amos 'n Andy.What to do about it? The only way Murrow could give them a show that could hold its own against the best the other networks could throw at it would be to get into the ratings game — a game he had roundly condemned as beneath serious journalists. But if wewere going to please the corporation — and that was something heknew quite a bit about because he was a member of the CBS hierarchyfor a while — it meant playing the game.