60 Minutes
Based on Wikipedia: 60 Minutes
The Show That Made News Profitable
Here's something that seemed impossible in 1968: a news program that people actually wanted to watch during prime time. Not just watch—tune in religiously, week after week, in numbers that rivaled sitcoms and dramas. Before 60 Minutes, the conventional wisdom in television was brutally simple. News was a loss leader. You aired documentaries to look respectable, knowing you'd lose money on every broadcast.
60 Minutes shattered that assumption so completely that it became, for a time, the most-watched program in all of American television.
The show debuted on September 24, 1968, created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard. Hewitt had cut his teeth producing the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and he had a theory about what made news compelling. It wasn't the news itself. It was the people telling it.
The Magazine Concept
The name wasn't accidental. Hewitt wanted to create a television version of a print magazine—multiple stories in one broadcast, each with its own character and pace. The Canadian program W5 had pioneered something similar two years earlier, but 60 Minutes would push the format further and, crucially, center everything on the personalities of its correspondents.
The first broadcast featured Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner sitting on opposite sides of a cream-colored set. Hewitt had chosen them deliberately as contrasts. Wallace was aggressive, combative, the kind of interviewer who made subjects squirm. Reasoner was warmer, more conversational, the guy you'd want to have a drink with. Together, they covered the full emotional range of journalism.
That inaugural episode was a grab bag of formats, as if the producers were still figuring out what the show could be. There were pieces on Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey during the 1968 presidential campaign. European writers offered commentary on American elections. Art Buchwald delivered political humor. Attorney General Ramsey Clark discussed police brutality. A scripted segment featured two silhouetted men—one of them Andy Rooney, who would later become inseparable from the show's identity—discussing the campaign. There was even an abbreviated Academy Award-winning short film about creativity.
The production details that would become iconic weren't there yet. The famous black backdrop? That came the following year. The distinctive logo in Eurostile typeface? Not until around 1974. Even the trademark ticking stopwatch, which would become one of the most recognizable sounds in television, didn't appear on that first broadcast.
Alpo dog food sponsored the premiere. That's the unglamorous truth about even legendary television.
The Struggle Before the Triumph
For its first three years, 60 Minutes was barely surviving.
The show aired biweekly on Tuesday evenings at 10 PM Eastern, alternating with other CBS News productions. Ratings were nothing special—about what you'd expect from any CBS documentary. Network executives remained skeptical. In that era, everyone knew the rules: news programming in prime time lost money. You scheduled it anyway because it made your news department look prestigious, which theoretically helped ratings for your evening newscasts. But nobody expected documentaries to actually compete.
Then two things happened. Harry Reasoner left for ABC in 1970, and the Federal Communications Commission, known as the FCC, changed the rules of television.
How Football and Regulation Made 60 Minutes a Hit
Morley Safer replaced Reasoner, taking over the gentler stories while Wallace continued his prosecutorial interviews. But the real transformation came from an unlikely source: government regulation and professional football.
In 1971, the FCC introduced something called the Prime Time Access Rule. The idea was to break the networks' stranglehold on evening programming by forcing them to give back time to local affiliates. On Sundays, affiliates got a full hour back from the networks. The FCC hoped stations would fill this time with local public affairs programming.
They didn't. Local programming was expensive to produce and nobody watched it. The ratings were terrible, which meant advertising revenue was terrible, which meant the whole endeavor was unprofitable. But the FCC had created an exception: network-produced news and public affairs shows could still air during this time.
After a six-month hiatus in late 1971, CBS found a home for 60 Minutes in this regulatory gap: 6 PM to 7 PM Eastern on Sundays, starting January 1972.
There was a problem, though. A big one. The National Football League.
CBS broadcast NFL games on Sunday afternoons, and those games were contractually protected from interruption. This protection existed because of something called the Heidi Bowl incident from November 1968. NBC had cut away from a dramatic AFL game between the Jets and Raiders—with the Jets leading—to start a previously scheduled broadcast of the children's movie Heidi exactly on time. The Raiders scored two touchdowns in the final minute to win, and viewers who'd been switched to Heidi missed it entirely. The outcry was so intense that networks afterward guaranteed football would never be cut off again.
This meant 60 Minutes couldn't air in the fall during football season from 1972 to 1975. The show essentially went on hiatus every autumn.
And yet, somehow, this worked in the program's favor.
The Vietnam and Watergate Years
The early 1970s were when American investigative journalism came into its own. The Vietnam War was grinding toward its conclusion, with revelations about its conduct becoming more damning by the month. Then came Watergate, the scandal that would bring down a presidency, unfolding in real time over two years.
At that moment, very few network news programs were doing genuine in-depth investigative reporting. 60 Minutes was. During the 1970-71 season alone, the show covered cluster bombs, the South Vietnamese Army, draft dodgers, Nigeria, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. Even Safer, the correspondent known for softer stories, was now doing hard investigations.
The audience grew steadily. People were hungry for this kind of journalism, and 60 Minutes was one of the few places to find it.
In 1975, the FCC amended its rules to give networks back an hour on Sundays—for news or family programming. A family drama called Three for the Road had flopped in the fall time slot. On December 7, 1975, 60 Minutes took its place at 7 PM Eastern.
The show has aired in that same time slot ever since. That's nearly fifty years in the same Sunday evening position—a record unmatched by any other weekly program in American television history.
Becoming Number One
The move to 7 PM, combined with adding White House correspondent Dan Rather to the team, transformed 60 Minutes from a respected news program into a genuine cultural phenomenon.
By 1976, it was the top-rated program on Sunday nights. By 1979, something unprecedented happened: 60 Minutes achieved the number one spot among all television programs in the Nielsen ratings. Not number one among news programs. Number one overall. A news broadcast was beating sitcoms, dramas, variety shows—everything.
This had never happened before. The entire history of network television had taught executives that news couldn't compete in prime time. 60 Minutes proved that conventional wisdom spectacularly wrong.
The financial implications were staggering. In 1975, a thirty-second advertising spot on 60 Minutes cost $17,000. By 1982, that same spot cost $175,000—more than a tenfold increase. The show that was supposed to lose money became a profit machine.
The Techniques That Changed Journalism
60 Minutes didn't just succeed; it invented much of what we now consider standard investigative television journalism.
The show pioneered hidden camera investigations, capturing subjects who didn't know they were being recorded. It developed the technique of re-editing interviews to sharpen their impact. And it perfected what critics called "gotcha journalism"—showing up unannounced at the home or office of an investigation's target, cameras rolling, to confront them with evidence of wrongdoing.
These techniques were controversial from the start. Some argued they were manipulative, that editing interviews could distort what subjects actually said, that ambush confrontations were more theater than journalism. Others countered that these methods exposed corruption that would otherwise remain hidden, that the powerful would never submit to fair questioning voluntarily.
What's undeniable is that 60 Minutes created a template. Similar programs emerged in Australia and Canada during the 1970s. Local television news stations across America adopted the show's methods. The style became so pervasive that it's now difficult to imagine investigative television without it.
The Format That Endures
Watch an episode of 60 Minutes today, and you'll recognize elements that have remained constant for decades.
Each broadcast typically contains three long-form stories, running about thirteen minutes each. There are no superimposed graphics cluttering the screen during the reports themselves—a deliberate choice that feels almost radical in an era of constant visual noise. Commercial breaks separate the stories, but that's the only interruption.
Each story begins with the correspondent sitting before a backdrop designed to look like magazine pages on the topic. It's a visual callback to the show's original concept: this is a magazine you're watching, not a newscast.
Most distinctively, 60 Minutes correspondents never share the screen with each other. They don't chat, don't banter, don't hand off to one another with collegial small talk. Each correspondent exists in their own visual universe with only the viewer for company. Hewitt understood something about television psychology: that isolation creates intimacy. When Mike Wallace looks into the camera and speaks to you, there's no one else in the frame. It's just him and you.
The current full-time correspondents are Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, and Bill Whitaker. Each has their own style, their own approach, but they all inhabit the same tradition stretching back to Wallace and Reasoner in 1968.
The Murrow Legacy
Don Hewitt understood where 60 Minutes fit in the history of broadcast journalism. He'd been the director of See It Now, the groundbreaking 1950s CBS series hosted by Edward R. Murrow. Murrow was the patron saint of television news, the man who had helped take down Senator Joseph McCarthy, the voice who had reported from London during the Blitz.
Murrow had also hosted Person to Person, a lighter program featuring celebrity interviews in their homes. In Hewitt's memorable phrase, 60 Minutes blended "higher Murrow" and "lower Murrow"—the serious investigative journalism of See It Now with the accessible personality profiles of Person to Person.
This combination was essential to the show's success. Pure investigation would have been too heavy. Pure profiles would have been too light. The mix kept audiences engaged across the full hour.
Point/Counterpoint: Debate as Entertainment
For most of the 1970s, 60 Minutes featured a segment called Point/Counterpoint, which put a liberal and conservative commentator on screen to debate issues of the day. James J. Kilpatrick argued the conservative position. First Nicholas von Hoffman, then Shana Alexander after 1974, represented the liberal view.
The segment was innovative—essentially live competing editorials, years before cable news would fill entire networks with this format. It caught the public imagination enough that Saturday Night Live created a memorable parody, with Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd abandoning all rhetorical decorum. Aykroyd's opening insult—"Jane, you ignorant slut"—became one of the show's most quoted lines. Curtin's response—"Dan, you pompous ass"—completed the exchange.
The real Point/Counterpoint ended in 1979 over money. Shana Alexander asked Hewitt to raise her pay above $350 per week. He declined. The segment was over.
CBS briefly revived the concept in 2003, pairing Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, opponents in the 1996 presidential election. They agreed to do ten segments. The experiment didn't continue past that initial run. Reports indicated the exchanges were considered too gentlemanly, lacking the feistiness audiences expected from political debate. Times had changed. CNN's Crossfire had raised the temperature. Polite disagreement no longer satisfied.
Andy Rooney's America
From 1978 to 2011, the program typically ended with a commentary by Andy Rooney. If the investigative pieces were about power and corruption, Rooney's segments were about coffee cans.
Literally. One of his recurring topics was measuring the amount of coffee in coffee cans, checking whether manufacturers were quietly giving consumers less product for the same price. Other segments ranged from international politics to personal philosophy, but they all shared Rooney's distinctive voice: curmudgeonly, skeptical, occasionally cranky, but fundamentally decent.
Rooney's pieces were light-hearted and humorous, a deliberate palate cleanser after the heavier journalism that preceded them. They also occasionally generated controversy. He once referred to actor Mel Gibson as a "wacko," which prompted complaints. But mostly, Rooney occupied a unique space in American media—the grandfather who said what he thought, consequences be damned, with just enough self-awareness to remain lovable.
The Football Dance
The relationship between 60 Minutes and the NFL has remained complicated for decades. Because CBS broadcasts afternoon football games that can run long, the news program often can't start at its scheduled 7 PM time.
The network's solution is straightforward: when a game runs late, 60 Minutes starts at the game's conclusion and airs in its entirety. Everything else that night gets pushed back. The Pacific time zone is the exception—games end earlier in the afternoon there, so the program always starts on time for West Coast viewers.
Starting in the 2012-2013 season, CBS changed the scheduled start time to 7:30 PM Eastern on weeks when a late afternoon game is airing. This accommodates an NFL policy requiring the second game of a doubleheader to begin at 4:25 PM.
The symbiosis runs deeper than scheduling logistics. CBS strategically programs sports events to lead into 60 Minutes—the final round of the Masters golf tournament, the PGA Championship, NCAA basketball tournament games. The sports audience flows into the news audience, each benefiting from the other's viewership.
Since the 2023-2024 season, the show has occasionally aired ninety-minute episodes, expanding beyond its traditional hour-long format.
Beyond Television
60 Minutes has expanded far beyond its Sunday CBS broadcast. Several radio stations simulcast the program, including major outlets in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston. These radio broadcasts sometimes air ahead of the television version, meaning listeners can hear the stories before viewers see them.
The show embraced digital distribution early. An audio podcast version, without advertising, became available starting in 2007. Full video episodes stream on CBSNews.com and Paramount+ hours after the original broadcast. The magazine format that seemed so innovative in 1968 has adapted to every new platform that's emerged since.
A Legacy of Influence
The awards and rankings tell part of the story. In 2002, TV Guide named 60 Minutes the sixth greatest TV show of all time. In 2013, the magazine ranked it twenty-fourth on its list of the sixty best series ever. Variety placed it twentieth on its 2023 ranking of the greatest shows in television history.
The New York Times has called it "one of the most esteemed news magazines on American television."
But influence is measured in imitation. The techniques 60 Minutes pioneered—the hidden cameras, the confrontational interviews, the reporter-as-star format—became the template for investigative television journalism worldwide. Every local news "investigation" that ambushes a suspected wrongdoer, every documentary that uses hidden cameras to expose fraud, every news magazine that builds stories around correspondent personalities—they're all working in the tradition 60 Minutes established.
The show proved something that seemed impossible: that serious journalism could be popular, that investigations could attract mass audiences, that news could not only compete in prime time but dominate it. In an era when the line between entertainment and information was supposedly uncrossable, 60 Minutes erased it.
The stopwatch keeps ticking. The correspondents keep investigating. And every Sunday at 7 PM Eastern—or whenever the football ends—millions of Americans still tune in to watch.