60 Minutes is an
American
investigative television newsmagazine,
which has run on CBS since 1968. The
program was created by long time producer
Don
Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of
reporter-centered investigation. It has been among the top-rated TV
programs for much of its life, and has garnered numerous awards
over the years. It is considered by many to be the preeminent
investigative television program in the United States.
The autumn of 2008 saw the program's 40th anniversary, and it
currently holds the record for the longest continuously running
program of any genre scheduled during American network
prime time; it has aired at 7 p.m. Eastern Time
Sundays since December 7, 1975. The 42nd season premiere took place
on September 27, 2009. The longer-running
Meet the Press has also aired in prime
time, but currently airs during the daytime, as it has for most of
its history. The
Walt Disney anthology
television series, which premiered in 1954, and the
Hallmark Hall of
Fame, which has aired since 1951, have aired longer, but
none of them has aired in prime time continually, as
60
Minutes has done.
60 Minutes is the first regularly scheduled television
program in American television history not to have ever used any
type of
theme music. The only theme
sound is from the signature Aristo
stopwatch in the opening title credits, before
each commercial break, and at the tail-end of the closing
credits.
Broadcast history
Early years
The
inspiration for the show came from the controversial Canadian
news program
This Hour Has Seven
Days, which ran from 1964 to 1966, and in turn, was
inspired by the British satire series That Was The Week That
Was. The show pioneered many of the most important
investigative journalism techniques, including re-editing
interviews, hidden cameras, and "gotcha" visits to the home or
office of an investigative subject.
Imitators sprang up in Australia, Canada
and the
United
Kingdom
during the 1970s, as well as on local television
news.
Initially,
60 Minutes aired as a bi-weekly show hosted by
Harry Reasoner and
Mike Wallace, debuting on
September 24, 1968 and alternating weeks with other CBS News
productions on Tuesday evenings. The first edition, described by
Reasoner in the opening as a "kind of a magazine for television,"
featured the following segments:
- A look inside the headquarter suites of presidential candidates
Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey during their respective
parties' national conventions that summer;
- Commentary by European writers Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter von Zahn, and Luigi Barzini, Jr. on the American
electoral system;
- A commentary by political columnist Art
Buchwald;
- An interview with then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark about police brutality;
- An abbreviated version of an Academy
Award-winning short film by Saul Bass,
Why Man Creates; and
- A meditation by Wallace and Reasoner on the relation between
perception and reality. Wallace said that the show aimed to
"reflect reality," while acknowledging the differing perceptions of
it.
The first "magazine-cover"
chroma key was
a photo of two helmeted policemen (for the Clark interview
segment). Wallace and Reasoner sat in chairs on opposite sides of
the set, which had a cream-colored backdrop; the more famous black
backdrop (which is still used as of 2009) did not appear until the
following year. The logo was in
Helvetica
type with the word "Minutes" spelled in all lower-case letters; the
logo most associated with the show did not appear until about 1974.
Further, to extend the magazine motif, the producers added a "Vol.
xx, No. xx" to the title display on the chroma key; that was seen
until about 1971. The trademark stopwatch, however, did not appear
on the inaugural broadcast; it would not debut until several
episodes later.
Alpo dog food was
the sole sponsor of the first program.
Don Hewitt, who had been a producer of the
CBS Evening News with
Walter Cronkite, sought out Wallace as a
stylistic contrast to Reasoner. According to one historian of the
show, the idea of the format was to make the hosts the reporters,
to always feature stories that were of national importance but
focused upon individuals involved with, or in conflict with, those
issues, and to limit the reports' airtime to around thirteen
minutes . However, the initial season was troubled by lack of
network confidence, as the show did not garner ratings much higher
than that of other CBS News documentaries. As a rule, during that
era, news programming during prime time lost money; networks mainly
scheduled public affairs programs in prime time in order to bolster
the prestige of their news departments, and thus boost ratings for
the regular evening newscasts, which were seen by far more people
than documentaries and the like.
60 Minutes struggled
under that stigma during its first three years.
Changes to
60 Minutes came fairly early in the program's
history. When Reasoner left CBS to co-anchor
ABC's
evening newscast (he would
return to CBS and the show in 1978),
Morley
Safer joined the team in 1970, and he took over Reasoner's
duties of reporting less aggressive stories.
However, when Richard
Nixon began targeting press access and reporting, even Safer,
formerly the CBS News bureau head in Saigon
and London
, began to do
"hard" investigative reports, and during the 1970-71 season alone
60 Minutes reported on cluster
bombs, the South Vietnamese
Army, Canada
's amnesty
for American draft dodgers, Nigeria
, the
Middle East, and Northern
Ireland
.
"Point/Counterpoint" segment
In 1971, the "Point/Counterpoint" segment was introduced, featuring
James J. Kilpatrick and
Nicholas von Hoffman (later
Shana Alexander), a three-minute debate
between spokespeople for the political
right and
left, respectively. This segment pioneered a
format that would later be adapted by
CNN for
its
Crossfire show.
This ran until 1979, when
Andy Rooney,
whose commentaries were already alternating with the debate segment
since the fall of 1978, replaced it; Rooney remains with the
program today.
Effects from the Prime Time Access Rule
By 1971, the
FCC
introduced the
Prime Time Access
Rule, which freed local network affiliates in the top 50
markets (in practice, the entire network) to take a half hour of
prime time from the networks on Mondays through Saturdays and one
full hour on Sundays. Because nearly all affiliates found
production costs for the FCC's intended goal of increased public
affairs programming very high and the ratings (thus advertising
revenues) low, making it mostly unprofitable, the FCC created an
exception for network-authored news and public affairs. After a
six-month hiatus in late 1971, CBS thus found a prime place for
60 Minutes in a portion of that displaced time, 6–7 p.m.
(
Eastern time; 5-6
Central) on Sundays, in January
1972.
This proved somewhat less than satisfactory, however, because in
order to accommodate
CBS' telecasts of
late afternoon
National
Football League games,
60 Minutes went on hiatus
during the fall from 1972 to 1975 (and the summer of 1972). This
took place because football telecasts were protected contractually
from interruptions in the wake of the infamous "
Heidi Game" incident on
NBC in November 1968. Despite the irregular
scheduling, the program's hard-hitting reports attracted a steadily
growing audience, particularly during the waning days of the
Vietnam War and the gripping events of
the
Watergate scandal; at that
time, few if any other major-network news shows did in-depth
investigative reporting to the degree carried out by
60
Minutes. Eventually, during the summers of 1973 through 1975,
CBS did allow the show back onto the prime time schedule proper, on
Fridays in 1973 and Sundays the two years thereafter, as a
replacement for the regular season's program.
It was only when the FCC returned an hour to the networks on
Sundays (for children's/family or news programming), taken away
from them four years earlier, in a
1975
amendment to the Access Rule that CBS finally
found a viable permanent timeslot for
60 Minutes. When a
family-oriented drama,
Three for the Road, ended after a
13-week run in the fall, the newsmagazine took its place at 7/6
p.m. on December 7. It has aired at that time since, for over 33
years, making
60 Minutes not only the longest-running
prime time program currently in production, but also the television
program (excluding daily programs such as evening newscasts or
breakfast shows) broadcasting for the longest length of time at a
single time period each week in U.S. television history.
This move,
and the addition of then-White House
correspondent Dan Rather
to the reporting team, made the program into a strong ratings hit
and, eventually, a general cultural phenomenon. This was no
less than a stunning reversal of the previously poor ratings
performances of documentary programs on network television, as
mentioned above. By 1976,
60 Minutes became the top-rated
show on Sunday nights in the U.S. By 1979, it had achieved the
number-one
Nielsen rating for all
television programs, unheard of before for a news broadcast in
prime time. This success translated into great profits for CBS;
advertising rates went from $17,000 per thirty seconds in 1975 to
$175,000 in 1982 .
The program sometimes does not start until after 7 p.m., due
largely to CBS's live broadcast of NFL games. At the conclusion of
the game, the network will end its coverage right away and air
60 Minutes in its entirety. The program's success has also
led
CBS Sports to schedule events leading
into
60 Minutes and the rest of the network's primetime
lineup, thus pre-empting the Sunday editions of the
CBS Evening News and affiliates' local
newscasts.
Pre-emptions since 1978
The program has rarely been pre-empted since about 1978. Two
notable pre-emptions occurred in 1976 and 1977, to make room for
the annual telecast of
The Wizard of Oz, which
had recently returned to CBS after having been shown on NBC for
eight years. However, CBS would, in later years, schedule the film
so that it would no longer pre-empt
60 Minutes.
CBS Radio
60
Minutes is also aired via CBS Radio
on several of their radio stations at the same time as the
television broadcast, such as WCBS-AM
, KNX
, WBBM-AM
, WWJ
, and several
other stations across the country owned by CBS. An audio
version of the full show is also distributed via
podcast and the
iTunes
Store, beginning with the September 23, 2007 broadcast . The
program's video also streams several hours after broadcast on
CBSNews.com and
CBS Interactive
property
CNET TV.
Format
The format of
60 Minutes consists of three long-form news
stories, without superimposed graphics. The stories are introduced
from a set which has a backdrop resembling a magazine story on the
same topic. The show undertakes its own investigations and follows
up on investigations instigated by national newspapers and other
sources.
Many topics center on allegations of wrongdoing and corruption on
the part of corporations, politicians, and other public officials.
Said figures are commonly either subjected to an interview, or
evade contact with the
60 Minutes crew altogether, either
by written notice or by simply fleeing from the approaching
journalist and his camera crew. Instead of summarizing an interview
or providing direct commentary on an issue,
60 Minutes
prefers to air the interview itself. When the subject is hiding a
secret, the viewers witness the evasion directly.
The show also features profiles. The profiles are occasionally of
celebrities and offer up a
biography of
the figure, focusing upon the celebrity's early life story,
obstacles, and choices, rather than offering a simple
publicity platform. Non-celebrity profiles usually
feature a person who has accomplished an heroic action or striven
to improve the world.
Occasionally, however, if a celebrity has written a book or has a
current film in release, the segment featuring them will also
promote the book or film. However, the celebrity in question will
always be profiled in detail, and never appears on the show simply
to promote his or her product.
In tone,
60 Minutes blends the probing journalism of the
seminal 1950s CBS series
See It
Now with
Edward R.
Murrow (a show for which Hewitt was
the director its first few years) and the personality profiles of
another Murrow program,
Person to Person. In Hewitt's own
words,
60 Minutes blends "higher Murrow" and "lower
Murrow."
For most of the 1970s, the program included the
Point/Counterpoint segment in which a liberal and a
conservative commentator would debate a particular issue. This
originally featured James J. Kilpatrick representing the
conservative side and
Nicholas von
Hoffman for the liberal, with
Shana
Alexander taking over for von Hoffman after he departed in
1974. Although discontinued in 1979, when
Andy Rooney, who had previously left the show
with Harry Reasoner in 1970, returned to offer commentary, the
segment was an innovation that caught the public imagination as a
live version of competing
editorials.
Point/Counterpoint was also lampooned by the
NBC comedy series
Saturday Night Live, which featured
Jane Curtin and
Dan Aykroyd as debaters, with Aykroyd typically
beginning his remarks with, "Jane, you ignorant slut", and in the
motion picture
Airplane!, in
which the
faux Kilpatrick argues in favor of the plane
crashing.
A similar concept was revived briefly in March 2003, this time
featuring
Bob Dole and
Bill Clinton, former opponents in the
1996 presidential
election. The pair agreed to do ten segments, which were called
"Clinton/Dole" and "Dole/Clinton" in alternating weeks, but did not
continue into the fall television season. Reports indicated that
the segments were considered too gentlemanly, in the style of the
earlier Point/Counterpoint, and lacked the feistiness of
Crossfire.
Since 1979, the show has usually ended with a (usually
light-hearted or humorous) commentary by Andy Rooney expounding on
topics of wildly varying import, ranging from international
politics, to economics, and to personal philosophy on every-day
life. One recurring topic has been measuring the amount of coffee
in coffee cans. Rooney's pieces, particularly one in which he
referred to actor
Mel Gibson as a
"wacko," have on occasion led to complaints from viewers.
On Sunday, October 29, 2006, the opening sequence changed from a
black background to white. The black background had been used for
over a decade. Also, the gray background for the Aristo stopwatch
in the "cover" changed to red.
Correspondents & hosts
Mike Wallace is perhaps
the iconic representation of the style of journalism for which the
show is known and has been on the show since its inception in 1968.
At 90 years old, Mike Wallace is not only one of the oldest
television personalities active today (four months older than
Helen Wagner, but three months younger
than off-screen
Saturday Night Live announcer
Don Pardo), but one who has lasted the longest
with one news show continuously, having been a part of
60
Minutes since its inception in 1968. On March 14, 2006,
Wallace announced his retirement from
60 Minutes after 37
years with the program. However, he continues to work for CBS News
as a "Correspondent Emeritus".
Current Correspondents and Commentators
Current Hosts:
Part-time Correspondents:
Past correspondents & hosts
Past Hosts:
- Harry Reasoner (host, 1968-1970
& 1978-1991)
- Mike Wallace (host,
1968–2006) — Correspondent Emeritus
- Ed Bradley (part-time correspondent,
1976-1981; host, 1981-2006)
- Dan Rather (part-time correspondent,
1968-1975; host, 1975-1981 & 2005-2006)
- Diane Sawyer (part-time
correspondent, 1981-1984; host, 1984-1989)
- Meredith Vieira (part-time
correspondent, 1982-1985 & 1991-1993; host, 1990-1991)
- Christiane Amanpour
(part-time correspondent, 1996-2000; host, 2000-2005)
Past Part-time Correspondents:
Commentators
Since 1978,
Andy Rooney has contributed
a commentary at the end of episodes.
Other commentators have included:
Producers
Ratings and recognition
Based on ratings,
60 Minutes is the most successful
broadcast in U.S. television history, since it was moved into its
present timeslot in 1975. For five of its seasons it has been that
year's top program, a feat only matched by the
sitcoms All in the Family and
The Cosby Show. It was a top ten show
for 23 seasons in a row (1977-2000), an unsurpassed record.
60 Minutes first broke into the Ratings Top 20 during the
1976-77 season. The following season it was the fourth-most-watched
show, and by 1979-80, it was the number one show. During the 21st
century it remains among the top 20 programs in the
Nielsen Ratings, and the highest-rated news
magazine.
CBS has
been the recipient of numerous awards, including Peabody Awards for the segments "All in the
Family", an investigation into abuses by government and military
contractors; "The CIA's Cocaine", which uncovered CIA involvement
in drug smuggling; "Friendly Fire", a report on incidents of
friendly fire in the Gulf War; and "Duke Rape Suspects Speak Out", the
first interviews with the suspects in the 2006 Duke
University lacrosse case
. They received an Investigative Reporter and
Editor medal for their segment "The Osprey", documenting a Marine
coverup of deadly flaws in the
V-22
Osprey aircraft. In 2007,
60 Minutes received twelve
Emmy Award nominations.
In 1983, a
report by Safer, "Lenell Geter's in
Jail," single-handedly freed from prison a Texas
man who was
wrongly convicted of armed robbery.
Controversies
The show has been praised for landmark journalism and received many
awards. However, it has also become embroiled in some controversy,
including:
William Westmoreland
In the 1982 "The Uncounted Enemy, a Vietnam Deception," which Mike
Wallace narrated for CBS Reports, the news division's documentary
program, it was reported that
William Westmoreland, former commander
of American military operations in the
Vietnam War, withheld information from
decision-makers in Washington for political reasons. Westmoreland
held a press conference a few days later, calling it a
'preposterous hoax,' and eventually sued for libel.
TV Guide issued a report called 'Anatomy of a
Smear,' detailing problems with the report, including the ignoring
of contrary evidence, and video editing to change the questions
Westmoreland is asked. Westmoreland withdrew the suit a few days
before the protracted case was given to the jury. He and CBS News
issued a joint statement in which CBS said it "does not believe
that General Westmoreland was unpatriotic or disloyal inperforming
his duties as he saw them." Westmoreland claimed a victory; CBS, in
a separate statement, said nothing in the trial changed its stance
that the report was "fair and accurate."
Unintended acceleration
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 covered a supposed problem of "unintended acceleration"
when the brake pedal was pushed, with emotional interviews with six
people who sued Audi (unsuccessfully) after they crashed their
cars, including one woman who had killed her six year old boy.
Footage was shown of a Audi 5000 with the accelerator moving down
on its own, accelerating the car, after an expert witness employed
by one of the plaintiffs modified it with a concealed device to
cause it to do so. Independent investigators concluded that this
was most likely due to driver incompetence, where the driver let
their foot slip off the brake and onto the accelerator. Tests by
Audi and independent journalists showed that even with the throttle
wide open, the car would simply stall if the brakes were actually
being used. Some claims were made that this was in part due to a
slightly closer placing of the pedals than in many American cars,
which allows smoother driving for greater fuel efficiency and more
control in an emergency situation.
The
incident devastated Audi sales in the United States
, which did not reach the same level for another
fifteen years. The initial incidents which prompted the
report were found by the
National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration and
Transport Canada to have been attributable
to operator error, where car owners had depressed the accelerator
pedal instead of the brake pedal. CBS issued a partial retraction,
without acknowledging the test results of involved government
agencies.
A rival to
60 Minutes,
Dateline NBC, would be found guilty of
similar tactics years later regarding fuel tank integrity on
General Motors pickup trucks.
Alar
In February 1989,
60 Minutes aired a report by the
Natural Resources
Defense Council claiming health problems with
daminozide (Alar), a chemical sprayed on apples.
Apple sales dropped and CBS was sued by apple growers.
Werner Erhard
A
60 Minutes broadcast of March 3, 1991 dealt with
controversies involving
Werner
Erhard's personal and business life. One year after the
60
Minutes piece aired, Erhard filed a lawsuit against CBS and a
variety of other defendants, claiming that the broadcast contained
several "false, misleading and defamatory" statements about Erhard.
Erhard dropped the lawsuit a few months before any court decision
had been reached on its claims. The
60 Minutes segment was
made unavailable with the disclaimer: "This segment has been
deleted at the request of CBS News for legal or copyright
reasons."
Brown and Williamson
In 1995, former
Brown &
Williamson Vice President for Research and Development
Jeffrey Wigand provided information to
60
Minutes producer
Lowell Bergman
that B&W had systematically hidden the health risks of their
cigarettes. (See
transcription.) Furthermore, it was alleged that
B&W had introduced foreign agents (
fiberglass,
ammonia, etc.)
with the intent of enhancing the effect of
nicotine. Bergman began to produce a piece based
upon the information, but ran into opposition from Don Hewitt who,
along with CBS lawyers, feared a billion dollar lawsuit from Brown
and Williamson. A number of people in CBS would benefit from a sale
of CBS to
Westinghouse
Electric Corporation, including the head of CBS lawyers and CBS
News. Also, because of the interview, the son of CBS President
Laurence Tisch was among the people
from the
big tobacco companies in the
risk of being caught having committed perjury.
Because of the hesitation from Hewitt,
The Wall Street Journal instead
broke Wigand's story. The
60 Minutes piece was eventually
aired with substantially altered content, and was missing some of
the most damning evidence against B&W. The
exposé of the incident was
published in an article in
Vanity Fair by
Marie Brenner, entitled
The Man Who Knew Too
Much.
The New York
Times wrote that
60 Minutes and CBS had "betrayed
the legacy of
Edward R. Murrow." The incident was turned into a
seven-times
Oscar-nominated feature
film entitled
The
Insider, directed by
Michael Mann and starring
Russell Crowe as Wigand,
Al Pacino as Bergman, and
Christopher Plummer as
Mike Wallace. Wallace denounced
the portrayal of him as inaccurate to his stance on the
issue.
U.S. Customs Service
60 Minutes alleged in 1997 that agents of the
U.S. Customs
Service ignored drug
trafficking across the Mexico – United States
border at San
Diego
. The only evidence was a memorandum
apparently written by Rudy Camacho, who was the head of the San
Diego branch office. Based on this memo, CBS alleged that Camacho
had allowed
trucks belonging to a particular
firm to cross the border unimpeded. Mike Horner, a former Customs
Service employee, had passed the memos on to
60 Minutes,
and even provided a copy with an official stamp. Camacho was not
consulted about the piece, and his career was devastated in the
immediate term as his own department placed suspicion on him. In
the end, it turned out that Horner had forged the documents as an
act of revenge for his treatment within the Customs Service.
Camacho successfully sued CBS for an unknown settlement, and Don
Hewitt was forced to issue an on-air retraction.
Kennewick man
A legal battle between archaeologists and the
Umatilla tribe over the remains of a
skeleton, nicknamed
Kennewick Man, was
reported on by
60 Minutes (October 25, 1998), to which the
Umatilla tribe reacted very negatively. The tribe considered the
segment heavily biased in favor of the scientists, cutting out
important arguments, such as explanations of
Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The report
focused heavily on the racial politics of the controversy and also
added inflammatory arguments, such as questioning the legitimacy of
Native American sovereignty -- much of the racial focus of the
segment was later reported to be unfounded or misinterpreted.
Viacom/CBS cross-promotion
In recent years the show has been accused of promoting books,
films, and interviews with celebrities who are published or
promoted by sister businesses in the
Viacom
media conglomerate (2000-2005), without disclosing the journalistic
conflict-of-interest to viewers.
"The Internet Is Infected" episode and the false hacker
photo
In the episode "The Internet Is Infected" (March 29, 2009)
SecureWorks' Don Jackson, a data protection professional, is
interviewed. Jackson himself declares in the program that: "A part
of my job is to know the enemy". However, during the interview,
Jackson shows a photo of Finnish upper level comprehensive school
pupils and falsely identifies them as notorious Russian
hackers.
In the photo, one of the children is wearing a jacket with the Coat
of Arms of Finland on it. Another one is wearing a cap which
clearly has the logo of Karjala, a Finnish brand of beer, on it.
The
principal of the school in Taivalkoski
confirmed that the photo was taken about five years
ago at the school.
The photo's exact origins are unknown, but it's widely known in
Finland being originally posted in a very popular Finnish social
networking site, IRC-Galleria, in the early 2000s. From there, due
to its partly humorous radical right content, it spread all over
Finnish internet communities and even originated a couple of
patriotically titled (but intentionally misspelled) mock
sites.
60 Minutes did issue a correction and on-air apology.
60 Minutes II
In 1999, a second edition of
60 Minutes was started in the
U.S., called
60 Minutes II. This edition was later renamed
60 Minutes by CBS for the fall of 2004 in an effort to
sell it as a high-quality program, since some had sarcastically
referred to it as
60 Minutes, Jr. CBS News president
Andrew Heyward said, "The Roman
numeral II created some confusion on the part of the viewers and
suggested a watered-down version". However, a widely-known
controversy which came to be known as "
Rathergate," regarding a report that aired
September 8, 2004, caused another name change. The show was renamed
60 Minutes Wednesday both to differentiate itself and to
avoid tarnishing the Sunday edition, as the editions were
editorially independent from one another. The show reverted to its
original title with Roman numerals on July 8, 2005, when the show
moved to a Friday night 8pm ET timeslot to finish its run. Its last
broadcast was on September 2, 2005.
International versions
Australia
The
Australian version of
60
Minutes premiered on 11 February 1979. It still airs each
Sunday night at 7:30pm on the
Nine
Network and affiliates.
Reporter
Richard Carleton suffered
a heart attack on 7 May 2006. He asked a question at a news
conference for the
Beaconsfield Mine collapse, then
walked out and suffered cardiac arrest.
Paramedics tried to revive him for 20 minutes
until an
ambulance arrived, but was
pronounced dead on arrival.
Although they have the rights to the format, as of 2007 they do not
have rights to the US stories. Nevertheless, they often air them by
subleasing them from
Network Ten.
In 1980
60 Minutes won a Logie Award
for their investigation of lethal abuses at Chelmsford
psychiatric
hospital in Sydney
. On
16 September 2007, the Australian
60 Minutes did a segment
on French sport
Parkour, which showcased
famous traceurs
Rhys James and
Shaun Woods.
Germany
In the mid-1980s, an edited version (approx.
30 minutes in length)
of the U.S. broadcast edition of 60 Minutes was shown for
a time on West
German
television. This version retained the
English-language soundtrack of the original, but also featured
German subtitles. This version may have been known as
30
Minuten.
New Zealand
The
New
Zealand
version of 60 Minutes has aired on
national television since 1989, when it was shown on TV3. In 1992 the rights were
acquired by
TVNZ, who began broadcasting it in
1993. The network aired the program for nine years before dropping
it in 2002 for its own program, entitled
Sunday.
Sunday is currently the highest rating current affairs
show broadcast on New Zealand television, followed by
20/20.
60 Minutes is now broadcast by rival
network TV3.
Portugal
The
Portuguese version of
60
Minutes airs on SIC Notícias and is hosted by Mário
Crespo.
Other versions
- A
briefly-lived Mexican
version appeared in the late 1970s.
- A
Peruvian
version aired in the early 1980s, called 60
Minutos. However, in the late 1980s also existed a
similarly named series, but unrelated to the series produced by CBS
News.
- In
2004, Brazil
's Rede Bandeirantes planned a licensed
localized version, but the plan was canceled.
- CBS Television Studios is
rumoured to be planning licensed localized versions for several
Latin American countries.
See also
References
Book references
- Who's Who in America 1998, "Hewitt, Don S." Marquis
Who's Who: New Providence, NJ, 1998. p. 1925.
- Who's Who in America 1998, "Wallace, Mike." Marquis
Who's Who: New Providence, NJ, 1998. p. 4493.
- Madsen, Axel. 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of
America's Most Popular TV News Show. Dodd, Mead and Company:
New York City, 1984.
Further reading
External links
U.S. version
Australian version
New Zealand version
France version