Page "60 Minutes" Paragraph 11
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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.
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, draft dodgers, Nigeria, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland.
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