Dish (17 page)

One way it would do this was to pay an “intermediary” who was then free to pass along a percent of the fee to the source. In 1981, for example,
60 Minutes
paid $10,000 to two fugitive gun runners, Frank E. Terpil and George Gregary Korkala. CBS insisted that it would never pay criminals for news, but admitted paying $12,000 to an “intermediary” whom network officials refused to identify. And in 1984,
60 Minutes
paid $500,000 for an interview with Richard Nixon. That money didn’t go directly to Nixon; rather, it went to a former aide, Frank Gannon, who coincidentally had dated CBS correspondent Diane Sawyer. Gannon did the actual interviewing and then paid Nixon. And CBS News has repeatedly offered newspaper reporters nationwide “finders’ fees” of $500 to $1,000 for tips leading to stories that make it onto
60 Minutes.
The show sometimes pays a source a “consultant” fee as it did “consultant” Jeffrey Wigand in its 1995 Brown & Williamson tobacco story.

Payments to its sources was only one of the troubling ways that
60 Minutes
gathered news. To heighten the drama in his pieces, Hewitt encouraged his correspondents to adopt a confrontational style. Balanced news, he felt, seldom made for entertaining, compelling, theatrical stories. “Tell me a story!” Hewitt used to insist. “Each segment has to be its own little morality play.” While the tactics produced money-making episodes, the critics who felt that they violated journalistic standards of fairness and objectivity included CBS’s own Walter Cronkite, who told the
New York Times,
“The confrontational form that sometimes produces more heat than light, I quarrel with. It is not my style. Some of the camera techniques bother me. The extreme close-up would make almost anybody look guilty. Under the hot lights perspiring, the slightest eye movement appears to be furtive.”

Hewitt and his correspondents ignored such complaints. Instead of reforming their tactics, they devised elaborate new methods
of staging interviews and manipulating their “news magazine” stories for dramatic effect. In one favorite ploy,
60 Minutes
crews would bring only one camera to interviews, which meant that instead of shooting the correspondent and the subject simultaneously they had to film the interview in two “takes.” In the first take the camera remained on the subject, and then when the interview was over the camera would be turned to the correspondent who would then be filmed reasking the questions. Often, the correspondent would first ask the questions in a very friendly manner, lulling the subject into thinking the interview was sympathetic, only to use a very different tone, one frequently expressing shock, dismay, or surprise, when asking the questions the second time around. “I was very surprised to note that they seemed to care as much about the question as the answers,” said the writer Jerzy Kosinksi, who was once interviewed by Mike Wallace for a segment on the director Roman Polanski. “I noticed it after the interview was over, when they turned the cameras around to film Mike reasking the questions. The process is very studied and very precise: He assumed an expression that was at once that of a man who knows and a boy who wants to find out, a fascinating mixture of the inquisitive and the inquisitional.”

Wallace, whose background was in acting, was the preeminent practitioner of this technique. In 1976 he interviewed Gene Pope and the
National Enquirer’s
editor Iain Calder for a segment on the tabloid. During the interview, Wallace first posed his questions in a friendly manner and then in the second taping adopted an accusatory tone. When Pope later complained about the unfairness, Wallace unapologetically replied, “Gene Pope was present, right?” Wallace asked. “Then he should have interrupted.” The story adopted a tone of moral indignation over what it claimed was the tabloid’s practice of printing falsehoods, and to prove its point, it disputed an
Enquirer
report that Walter Cronkite earned $750,000 a year by airing a tape of the anchorman saying, “That’s
not
the way it is. Not even close! Not half that!” In fact, Cronkite had a base salary of $650,000 and also received perks and three months of paid vacation that valued his total compensation at $750,000. Then to discredit a story the tabloid had run about a hot romance between Raquel Welch and Freddie
Prinze,
60 Minutes
had footage of Rona Barrett disputing the story. “Everything they wrote is totally false,” said Barrett. “They are totally made up quotes. So said Raquel Welch to me!”

Before taping interviews, Wallace would sometimes cozy up to subjects off camera, making them think they were friends, joking or sympathizing with their plight, luring them into a false sense of security, hoping to get them to say something off guard on camera. Once in a while, however, the ploy backfired. In 1981 Wallace was preparing a segment on whether the San Diego Federal Savings and Loan was making loans to low-income families, especially poorly educated minorities, who couldn’t afford to repay the loans. Wallace was interviewing a bank officer named Richard Carlson, and during a break in filming, Wallace started kidding around with Carlson about how complicated the loan forms were. “You bet your ass they are hard to read,” Wallace said to Carlson, “if you’re reading them over watermelon or over tacos.” Although 60
Minutes
cameras weren’t rolling, the bank had set up its own cameras. Wallace, who thought the bank’s cameras were off, was furious.

Several months later, Wallace received a call from a
Wall Street Journal
reporter asking about the incident. Wallace was able to persuade the reporter that there was no story. The 60
Minutes
correspondent then called the bank, complaining that the
Journal
was trying to “destroy” him and asking the bank to erase the tapes. “Look,” Wallace reportedly said, “I know this is not a very good thing to ask in this era of erased tapes [but] I would be exceedingly grateful if you would excise them for me.” Wallace had almost forgotten about the incident—and, some say, the segment—when the
New York Times
called. Again, Wallace talked the paper out of writing about the incident. Then, a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
called. Under the same sort of aggressive questioning he himself employed, Wallace admitted that he has a “penchant for obscenity and for jokes,” and he tried to justify his comments about “tacos” and “watermelons” by arguing that the remark had been partly tactical, intended to elicit “some hint of [Carlson’s] feeling toward the minority community.”

On other occasions, Wallace was accused of conflicts of interest, such as when he accepted a speaking fee from Amway, a
company he had recently investigated, or when he put pressure on his colleague, Ed Bradley, to go soft on an investigation of Haiti, where his then wife had family and business concerns.

Hewitt and Wallace also had reputations as incorrigible womanizers. When Hewitt was called in to rescue Sally Quinn during her disastrous stint as co-host of
CBS Morning News,
he informed her they were going to have an affair. Quinn declined, explaining that she was dating Ben Bradlee. “Don’t give me that shit,” Hewitt told Quinn, according to her account in
We’re Going to Make You a Star.
When she continued to rebuff him, he stopped helping her show, but told her: “Well, if you won’t sleep with me, I’ll sleep with Barbara Walters.” According to one report—which Hewitt vehemently denied—he once pinned a subordinate against a wall and stuck his tongue down her throat. She freed herself by kneeing him in the groin. Hewitt’s star reporter, Mike Wallace, also had a reputation for unwelcome sexual friskiness with coworkers: slapping their bottoms, undoing or snapping their bra straps, or putting his hands on their thighs. “One producer said that basically, Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt thought this was their right,” according to Mark Hertsgaard, who wrote about
60 Minutes
for
Rolling Stone.
Hertsgaard later claimed that after Hewitt called and complained to editor Jann Wenner, the most shocking details of the piece were cut. “Sexual harassment was not the point of the investigation,” according to Hertsgaard, “it was just so pervasive at the time that you couldn’t miss it.”

“I’m just an old fashioned guy,” Wallace said in his defense. “I come from a time when joking about that sort of thing was commonplace. And that’s what I was doing. Joking.” Hewitt chose not to comment on the allegations.

Despite Hewitt’s reputation as a womanizer, he apparently had few qualms about broadcasting a segment in which Kathleen Willey accused President Clinton of groping her in a manner much less offensive than Hewitt’s own alleged advances. “It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the
New York Times,”
Hertsgaard later noted. “He’s talking about what [Clinton allegedly did to Willey], and I just thought of that old Dylan song [lyric], ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve.’

Critics charged that Hewitt’s team had coached Willey and
edited the tape to make her look good. Some said it was to make the story stronger. Some said Hewitt was motivated by revenge. Several years earlier, when Bill Clinton’s candidacy was nearly derailed by Gennifer Flowers’s charges that they had been sexually involved, it was a
60 Minutes
segment that put his campaign back on track. “They came to us because they were in big trouble in New Hampshire,” Don Hewitt reportedly said later. “They were about to lose right there and they needed some first aid. They needed some bandaging. What they needed was a paramedic. So they came to us and we did it and that’s what they wanted to do.” According to columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, Don Hewitt told Bill Clinton just before the interview: “The last time I did something like this, Bill, it was the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and it produced a President. This will produce a President, too.” Hewitt heard afterward that Hillary Clinton was upset because she didn’t like the way the segment had been edited. Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald complained to Hewitt that the candidate and his wife had wanted to discuss politics. “I said to Mandy, ‘You know, if I’d edited it your way, you know where you’d be today? You’d be sitting up in New Hampshire looking for the nomination.’ He became the candidate that night.” To Hillary, he says, he wrote a letter. “Sore losers I understand. Sore winners are beyond me. What are you sore about?” Although he says he never doubted Gennifer Flowers’s story, it had already been out. Good television had to be a revelation—even if you didn’t believe what was behind the revelation.

Despite the personal and professional behavior of Hewitt and his star reporter Wallace,
60 Minutes
became both one of the most profitable programs in the history of network television and was celebrated as a model of journalistic integrity. It climbed from seventy-second in the ratings in its 1968 debut to fifty-second in 1975, to eighteenth in 1977 and to number four in 1978. By the late 1970s,
60 Minutes
was the envy of the other networks. “As the most honored show on television, with dozens of Emmys, Peabodys and Polks to its credit, ‘60 Minutes’ has added immeasurably to its network’s prestige,” the
New York Times
noted in 1979. “‘60 Minutes’ is CBS’s only regular entry in the top 10 and as such is able to charge as much as $215,000 per commercial
minute. Since the show is, by television standards, comparatively inexpensive to produce, coming in at around $200,000 a week, and since each show offers six commercial minutes, the profit margin is significant.”

“There’s nothing tabloidy about ambush journalism,” Mike Wallace insisted. “Unless you’re doing it for drama, in which case it’s to be deplored…. After a while, we realized that we had become, to a degree, caricatures of ourselves because we were paying more attention to the drama than to the illumination of an issue.”

Through shrewd packaging and an uncanny understanding of which targets to aim for, Don Hewitt had created a news magazine that escaped the label of tabloid, but it was, in fact, exactly that: entertainment disguised as news. By the late 1970s all of Don Hewitt’s past transgressions had been forgiven or forgotten and the man who staged interviews and paid sources for stories was lecturing at colleges and journalism centers about the evils of tabloid television and the relentless quest for ratings.

“I think that sensationalism is a wonderful word,” said Wallace, “if by sensationalism you mean, ‘Hey! Holy shit! I didn’t know that!’ That’s really what we do.”

From time to time, Hewitt also acknowledged his role in the tabloidization of television news. “‘60 Minutes’ has single-handedly ruined television,” he once admitted. “No one can report news today without making money.”

Cher was the sort of celebrity, Dick Stolley knew, who sometimes needed to be protected from herself. It was 1976, two years after Time Inc. had launched the much-maligned but wildly popular
People
magazine with Stolley at the helm, and Cher was one of the magazine’s favorite cover subjects. During the 1970s, Cher and
People
would work to serve each other well—both riding that decade’s rediscovery of celebrity voyeurism. It was a symbiotic relationship, one that depended on reciprocal cooperation. Cher would appear on the cover of
People
magazine more than any other star in the 1970s—and nearly every issue became that year’s best-seller. Over the years,
People
frequently came across—and ignored—embarrassing information about the flamboyant singer, including the time she and Sonny had his-and-her nose jobs and how Cher had her breasts lifted and they had become infected from the surgery. Although Cher had a neurotically shy side, she also was an exhibitionist who loved publicity; back before she was famous she would stand in front of a mirror and practice telling paparazzi and autograph hounds to leave her alone. “There are too many of you,” she would tell the imaginary crowds. “I
just don’t have time for all of you.” Cher had the conflicting feelings toward fame that is so common among celebrities—she would complain about invasions into her privacy while telling reporters details about her latest est session. She loved saying outrageous things to the press. “Feel my ass,” she once told boyfriend David Geffen while a journalist was just trying to interview him. “Hard as a rock.” Then, still in full view of the reporter, she ran her tongue all over Geffen and stuck it in his mouth.