Book Review: Ticking clock: Behind the scenes at 60 minutes by Rosen Ira

Abstract

In 1968, CBS News aired the first episode of “60Minutes” and created a new broadcast genre, the television news magazine, which provided more depth than the network’s nightly half-hour newscast, and more variety and pizzaz than the sober hour-long single-issue documentaries of the day. The show introduced entertainment values and multimillion-dollar profits to the once unprofitable news division, prompting other networks to launch a host of imitators that continue to this day. The key to the program’s success was packaging it as the adventures of its star correspondents: Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Dan Rather, and others. However, behind the scenes, the real journalismwas done by the show’s invisible off-air producers who dug up the show’s stories, scouted field locations, conducted most of the interviews, and often wrote the scripts that the famous correspondents narrated—for far less money than the ballyhooed on-air “talent” was paid. Ira Rosen, one of Wallace’s producers, in his book “Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes” describes the toxic work culture that permeated “60 Minutes.” He writes that the newsroom was filled with screaming, shouting, and humiliating verbal abuse, as well as chronic back-stabbing and stealing of colleagues’ sources and stories. “The tension of the job led...producers to develop heart disease or cancer at an early age,” Rosen writes. “But I endured all the abuse, in part out of fear, but mostly out of ambition” (pp. 24, 4). For Rosen, the power and prestige of working at “60 Minutes” was irresistible—exciting travel, lavish expense accounts, brushing elbows with the famous: “It was like being Superman” (p. 5). The investigative reporting in which Rosen specialized reached an audience of millions and his exposés of crooked politicians, con men, and Mafiosi often produced dramatic results. Rosen describes hunting the bad guys for CBS “like being a spy with a license to kill” (p. 4). (Full disclosure: I occasionally crossed paths with Rosen during my career in television news, though we neither competed nor worked together.) Book Review