’60 Minutes’ creator Don Hewitt turned TV news profitable
Don Hewitt pauses for a photo in 1998 in his New York office with some of the Emmy awards won by his beloved news magazine 60 Minutes. Hewitt died at home Wednesday in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
The 1960 televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was watched by 70 million Americans. It proved a turning point in the presidential race, in large part because an ailing Nixon rejected Hewitt’s advice to use professional makeup instead of a cheaper product. Nixon’s sickly appearance while he recuperated from a staph infection, in contrast to the tan and vigorous Kennedy, was seen as helping to turn the election in Kennedy’s favor.
“From that day on,” Hewitt later said, “you can’t even think of running for office in the greatest democracy on Earth unless you’ve got the money to buy television time.”
Hewitt, who spent his career at CBS News, also directed programs of such early TV news giants Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. He led coverage of political conventions, royal weddings and coronations, papal installations and national days of mourning for assassinated leaders including Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
With the debut of 60 Minutes in 1968, Hewitt merged elements of news and entertainment and shattered the traditional view that news divisions were run as a public trust with little concern for how much money they made. Hewitt also was a central voice in the 1990s debates over corporate censorship in journalism when network executives interfered with a 60 Minutes segment on a tobacco industry whistleblower.
Hewitt’s impact on television was almost unparalleled, said Marvin Kalb, founding director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former reporter for CBS and NBC News.
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