Read an Excerpt from 'Tell Me a Story'

April 3, 2001 -- 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.

Going with the flow was what it was, but it was the only way to"make it" with the people he worked for and the only way to put thekind of money in his pocket that would take care of his wife, Janet,and their son Casey after he was gone. The broadcast he agreed todo was called Person to Person, and it concerned itself each weekwith visiting the homes of famous people.

We who worked on Ed's prestigious Sunday afternoon broadcast,See It Now, soon saw the public gravitating to Person to Person in thekind of numbers that frequently put it in the top ten while we lan-guishedin the cellar.It was John Horne, the TV critic of the New York Herald Tribune,who coined the phrases "high Murrow" and "low Murrow" to distin-guishbetween the two broadcasts.

Oh my God, I thought. That's the answer. Why not put themtogether in one broadcast and reap the benefits of being both prestigiousand popular? For the first time, there could be a way for a televisionshow to feed the network's soul and, simultaneously, itspocketbook. We could look into Marilyn Monroe's closet so long aswe looked into Robert Oppenheimer's laboratory, too. We couldmake the news entertaining without compromising our integrity.That, in essence, was the genesis of 60 Minutes.

It could be like the old Life magazine, I thought — a family friendin the home of millions of Americans each week, serious and light-heartedin the same issue. The ads didn't interrupt the stories in Life:You'd have a story for a few pages, then some ads, then another story.

We could do the same thing on television, each reporter telling acomplete story without interruption, then the commercial break. Ifwe split the public affairs hours into three parts to deal with theviewers' short attention span — not to mention my own — and madeit personal journalism in which a reporter takes the viewer alongwith him on the story, I was willing to bet that we could take informationalprogramming out of the ratings cellar.

I began to tell people at the network about my notion of an hour-longprogram combining "high Murrow" and "low Murrow." FredFriendly thought it was a terrible idea, but I was undeterred and keptworking on refining and improving the concept. A short time later,Friendly had a run-in with the top network management over theirreluctance to preempt afternoon soap operas to carry the Fulbrighthearings, in which the Senate probed the conduct of and the whys andwherefores of our presence in Vietnam. Following Friendly's resigna-tionas president of CBS News, Richard S. Salant, who came from thelegal department, took over. So I wrote a note to him, asking him whyin the hundreds of prime-time minutes of make-believe that CBSbeamed into American living rooms each week, the network couldn'tfind "60 minutes" of prime time to air some reality, produced with thesame flair that the entertainment division had become famous for.

Salant, hardly overwhelmed by or even vaguely interested inwhat I had proposed, told CBS News Vice President Bill Leonardthat it was a lousy idea. "That's funny," Leonard said. "That's exactlywhat Friendly said." Believe it or not, that is how 60 Minutes gotborn. Because anything Friendly was against, Salant was for — evenif it meant turning over a prime time hour each week to me, aboutwhom he felt, at best, lukewarm.

In early 1968, Salant reluctantly put his seal of approval on myproposed broadcast, which took its title from the phrase in mymemo, "60 minutes of prime time."