24 September

60 Minutes gets its first showing on CBS television

1968 Created by veteran CBS producer Don Hewitt, who had directed Edward R. Murrow’s See it Now show – not to mention the debates between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon – 60 Minutes (actually 42 minutes without the adverts) has offered high-quality investigative reporting in the format of a television news magazine for 42 years. It’s the longest-running prime time programme still in production in the United States.

Its popularity has been staggering for a news review in prime time. Always in the top twenty, it actually topped out the Neilson audience measurement ratings in 1976. It has won getting on for 80 Emmy awards, swung major policy decisions, even got into the movies, when the network’s struggle with the tobacco industry was dramatised in The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999).

Inevitably in that long run there have been pratfalls. One very embarrassing one also says a lot about what’s been happening to the American media recently. On 6 September 2004, Dan Rather, the seasoned anchor man for the CBS Evening News, did a 60 Minutes piece alleging that President George W. Bush had gone absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War of the 1970s. This was a serious charge, right in the middle of a presidential election, and the liberals loved it. Bush was already under fire for using family influence to get himself posted to the National Guard as a safe alternative to combat in Vietnam. But Rather seemed to seal the accusation by showing a series of letters and memos from Bush’s National Guard commander ‘grounding’ him – that is, withdrawing his flight status (and extra pay) – for failure to report for a physical examination, and for other absences from duty.

Within hours, bloggers began to post doubts about the documents shown on 60 Minutes. The letterheads and signature blocks were wrong. Above all, the body type of the letters and memos themselves could never have been produced in the early 1970s, when hard-type typewriters printed letters all of the same width, and could not ‘kern’, or fold letters like ‘f’ and ‘l’ into one another. The documents shown on 60 Minutes all had letter spaces of variable widths, with those kerned where appropriate. They had been produced on a word-processor, using Microsoft Word with default settings, some 30 years after their purported dates.

After some huffing and puffing, CBS admitted its mistake. Rather apologised too, then lost his job. 60 Minutes soldiered on, and ultimately recovered. But the wider lesson was that a new force had entered the world of news broadcasting. Following the tsunami disaster later that year, a significant number of Americans turned to blogs for breaking news. Increasingly, the internet began to look like the news medium of choice for the new millennium.