"Mike Wallace, 93, hard-boiled news reporter for ‘60 Minutes’" by Tim Weiner | New York Times, April 09, 2012
NEW YORK - Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of the nation’s best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on “60 Minutes,’’ died Saturday. He was 93....
When “60 Minutes’’ made its debut the trademark ticking of the Tag Heuer stopwatch marked the moment. It was something new on the air: a “news magazine,’’ usually three substantial pieces of about 15 minutes each - a near-eternity on television. Mr. Wallace and Harry Reasoner were the first co-hosts, one fierce, one folksy.
The show, which moved to Sunday nights at 7 in 1970, was slow to catch on. Creative conflict marked its climb to the top of the television heap in the 1970s. Mr. Wallace fought his fellow correspondents for the best stories and the most airtime....
The time was ripe for investigative television journalism.
Yup, that was a LONG, LONG TOME AGO, and the more you think of it the more it appears the media was managed even back then.
Watergate and its many seamy sideshows had made muckraking a respectable trade.
It now becomes clear to me that Watergate was only a story because Nixon threatened the Zionist order. Whatever you think of Nixon, he understood the powers he was confronting. Hell, he knew of the JFK conspiracy, what with his appeal to the CIA for help in the cover-up or it could open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again.
By the late 1970s, “60 Minutes’’ was the top-rated show on Sundays. For five consecutive years it was the number one show on television, a run matched only by “All in the Family’’ and “The Cosby Show.’’
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Myron Leon Wallace was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 9, 1918, one of four children of Friedan and Zina Wallik, who had come to the United States from a Russian shtetl before the turn of the 20th century. His father started as a wholesale grocer and became an insurance broker....
Do I even need to type it?
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Related:
"From Mike Wallace To Judith Miller
by
The Insider
One of the greats of television journalism is dead. He passed away Saturday night at a caring home in the United States.
At 93, Mike Wallace leaves behind a tremendous legacy. There is little question that American ingenuity takes the credit for the rise of TV journalism in the world. Mr. Wallace belonged to a generation of American TV professionals who set the standards for what we recognize globally today as news television.
That generation of American journalists set the bar very high.
That's the reason why the US media became so influential in the world. It certainly didn't happen because America had a formidable military power.
What is unfortunate is that influential parts of US media failed to maintain the standards set by Mr. Wallace's generation, of rigorous questioning of authority. And of maintaining a credible distance between journalism and authority. Certainly the media's relationship with government must not be confrontational. But it should not be prone to government manipulation at critical times, such as when the state decides to launch a war of choice characterized by deceit.
That's what happened with Judith Miller who misled The New York Times, the American people and the world on Iraq and the links between terrorists and WMD. But she was not alone. NYT editors helped her and the paper become a PR arm for the government. It took one of those editors eight years to come clean on this.
It gets worse. In recent years, some American editors willingly provided accreditation to intelligence agents disguised as journalists. It happened in the case of Roxana Saberi, caught red handed in Tehran spying for Central Intelligence Agency. She was released under a deal whose terms remain secret but appear to include a commitment on her part never to speak to US media about what she was doing in Iran. She was not a journalist and yet an editor of an American newspaper issued her a press card as cover for spying for CIA in another country.
After 2002, a new type of journalism invaded US media and we in Pakistan experienced it firsthand. All of a sudden there was a rush of 'news reports' and opinion pieces all seemingly coming from diverse outlets quoting unnamed sources but reading from the same talking points: Pakistan is evil, nukes are up for grab, and this is a place worse than Iraq and hence needs to be fixed.
None of this has anything to do with Mr. Wallace's legacy.
And yet his passing provides us an opportunity to remember what endeared America to the world. It is the pure American ingenuity personified by Mr. Wallace's creed. That's the real face of America that the world should see. Not the militaristic, deceitful and the warmongering one personified by Ms. Miller, Ms. Saberi and those who backed them. Recently, this Miller-Saberi side of America has turned hateful, with the near assassination of Gabrielle Gifford and the brutal murder of an Iraqi mother in an American suburb.
It's been a long way from Mike Wallace to Judith Miller. But it is Wallace that represents what's good about America. Let's stick to that.
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"The major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. The product is audiences, [and] for the elite media, [they're] relatively privileged audiences. So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product." -- Noam Chomsky (from Take the Rich Off Welfare -- Odonian Press, p133) -- Wake the Flock Up
Also see: Noam Chomsky: Controlled Asset Of The New World Order
Related: Amy Goodman, Left Gatekeeper
Democracy Now
That's the deepest cut of all.
The "alternative" press is nothing but a controlled-opposition operation.
"The major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. The product is audiences, [and] for the elite media, [they're] relatively privileged audiences. So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product." -- Noam Chomsky (from Take the Rich Off Welfare -- Odonian Press, p133) -- Wake the Flock Up
Also see: Noam Chomsky: Controlled Asset Of The New World Order
Related: Amy Goodman, Left Gatekeeper
Democracy Now
That's the deepest cut of all.
The "alternative" press is nothing but a controlled-opposition operation.
