Mike Wallace's Jugular Journalism

By Thomas Griffith

The face is familiar: the sharp eyes, the alert and aggressive manner, the quick and probing questions--and sometimes the grin of disbelief crossing the face as a quarry makes an unconvincing reply. Mike Wallace, though not a newspaperman, is what most Americans probably think an investigative reporter looks like. Television's 60 Minutes, which he, Morley Safer and Dan Rather preside over, rarely makes headlines with its reporting, but it consistently hits the mark with tales of wrongdoing and with vivid, edgy interviewing.

Investigative reporting, at its infrequent best, is journalism's most exciting and salable commodity. But when there's no Watergate around to pursue, many reporters, with a lot of dubious huffing and puffing, in print and on the air, try desperately to make less sound like more. 60 Minutes, with its hard-driving style, sometimes falls into this trap too, but its average is high.

Outside of the nightly news, 60 Minutes is network television's single ongoing success in news programming. It draws large audiences while documentaries are dying of public inattention. The differences between 60 Minutes and your ordinary documentary are much on the mind of the program's executive producer, Don Hewitt, who for 15 years produced the CBS Evening News.

Documentaries average a dismal percentage of the audience: "Perhaps," says Hewitt, "it's even the same 15%--all documentary freaks." To give 60 Minutes a better rating, CBS programs it against two kiddie shows early Sunday evening. But there are other reasons for its healthy 39% audience share. Hewitt aspired to put on a "LIFE magazine of the air" and insisted on multisubject programs. He wanted the same team appearing regularly, and he wanted his men out reporting, not studiobound as anchormen or hosts. Wallace agrees: "I had no intention of becoming the Ed Sullivan of news shows." In the beginning, Wallace was paired with the wry and amiable Harry Reasoner, in black-hat-and-white-hat contrast. Safer succeeded Reasoner; Rather was added to ease the work pressure on the other two. With three tough questioners, the program now has a flintier tone.

Bogart Fashion. Mike Wallace honed his own tough style years ago on a show called Night Beat, where, with back to the camera and head wreathed in cigarette smoke, he grilled subjects in Humphrey Bogart fashion. A tense-springed man, he still questions intently, but not so relentlessly.

As show biz, 60 Minutes obviously works, but, it raises some journalistic questions about the reporter as actor. Wallace is good as both. His interviews with names in the news may be sharper but don't otherwise differ from most interviews. The Shah of Iran gets his oil philosophy across, even if he has to endure Wallace's questioning about torture by his secret police. And such interviews have fail-safes: they take an hour, and are edited down to perhaps 15 minutes on the air. After ten minutes, in the pause for reloading the camera, Wallace may say, "You're giving me involved answers. Let's start all over again." Or, "You're being less than interesting." All too often the subject too feels a need to be interesting--sometimes at his own cost.

Investigative stories are something else. On these, Wallace considers himself a "point man." 60 Minutes deploys 15 producers and 15 film editors on teams permanently assigned to Wallace, Safer or Rather. The three reporters may be at work on half a dozen stories at one time, each of the producers on just one. A team gets on the scene of a story early, shoots some film and is all ready with people to be interviewed and questions to be asked when Wallace hits town.

To dramatize wrongdoing, 60 Minutes is not above secretly filming a clerk selling juvenile porn films, then returning with Wallace to surprise the clerk with the evidence. Or opening a dummy storefront Medicaid office, then photographing from behind a two-way mirror the operators of Illinois medical labs who promise doctors kickbacks. To show how easily, if armed with a phony birth certificate, anyone can get on welfare, buy airline tickets, even get a passport, 60 Minutes Researcher Lucy Spiegel was filmed doing all these things --and committed a felony in applying for a false passport. She got away with it, because the story idea came originally from Frances Knight, head of the passport bureau.

Getting something dramatic on-camera, and sometimes drawing blood, is the goal and art of the program. The technique is to create circumstances on-camera where some wrongdoer will do or say what 60 Minutes is trying to prove about him. Wallace calls this "realtime drama," in which he himself doesn't know what's going to happen. "You play it by ear. As the situations pile up, information falls out." Often Wallace's questions don't seem intended to elicit facts. Viewers learn the facts from Wallace's questions, not from the answer ("Isn't it true that ... ?"; "Didn't you know very well when ... ?"). The aim, says Producer Hewitt, is "to elicit emotion." It can be very dramatic: when Wallace confronts a man who has got rich running a Florida camp for 300 troubled children, most of whom are kept under medication, Wallace accuses him of "warehousing kids for money." Twitching, licking his lips, the man says, "You're cutting me open today." Is Mike Wallace as put off by evasive answers, or as angered by the subject's conduct, as he seems on-camera? "That's role playing," he grins.

Ego Trip. Why should anyone, particularly one with something ta hide, ever submit to a Mike Wallace interview? Now that the program has been going eight years, you'd think it would be clear that Wallace usually wins (he glumly acknowledges two defeats--by Nixon Henchmen H.R. Haldeman and G. Gordon Liddy). Producer Hewitt has an explanation: "There's an ego. Everyone thinks he can handle himself. They don't think Mike knows; they have no idea how much homework he's done. It's an ego trip they can't resist."

60 Minutes is journalistic theater. On investigative stories, its means sometimes come close to entrapment. It isn't enough to say that the fellow had it coming and had been obliging enough to prove the point on-camera. What gives 60 Minutes its validity is that its practitioners, aware of the demagogic potentialities of their method, have been conscientious about not abusing it.

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