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60 Minutes: Don Hewitt
built 192 days ago
On November 23, 1986, 60 Minutes aired a segment greenlit by Don Hewitt, concerning the Audi 5000 automobile, a popular German luxury car. The story concerned a number of incidents where the car purportedly accelerated without warning while parked, injuring or killing people. 60 Minutes was unable to duplicate this behavior, and so hired an outside consultant to modify the transmission to behave in this manner, and aired a story about it.
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In December, "60 Minutes" founder Don Hewitt apologized on-air for a June 1, 1997, story based on a British documentary about smugglers who swallowed heroin in latex gloves to get past authorities. An investigative panel later determined that the documentary producers had faked locations and paid actors to portray drug couriers.
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Almost three decades later Hewitt flippantly claimed 60 Minutes destroyed television by equating news with the profit motive; news organizations sought money in magazine and entertainment news programs, reducing their long-standing, and expensive, commitments to breaking news. But Hewitt set the groundwork. His blunt statements suggesting that success depends on marketing, and his continuous refinements of the product often generated controversy. Audiences must experience stories in the pit of their stomach, the narrative must take the viewer by the throat, and, noted Hewitt, when a segment is over it's not significant what they have been told--"only what they remember of what you tell them." Hewitt predicted high ratings if 60 Minutes packaged stories, not news items, as "attractively as Hollywood packages fiction." Such stories require drama, a simplified structure, a narrative maximizing conflict, a quick editing pace, and issues filtered through personalities.
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"I think in some ways he symbolizes `60 Minutes' at its best," Fager said. "He is the best reporter in the business and you don't get better in terms of writing and reporting. His stories are always good. He doesn't do clunkers."
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Don Hewitt