The end of the 60 Minutes broadcast as we know it has sickened millions of longtime viewers, colleagues, and all of us who are offended and threatened by our current administration and its cronies’ assaults on the first amendment. The news of Scott Pelley’s firing hits particularly hard. He spoke of “risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast”.
Having literally grown up with that broadcast – my father, Morley Safer, joined the program when I was eight months old and retired 46 years later – I am acutely aware of the costs of that devotion. 60 Minutes, particularly in its early days, demanded commitments of time and travel that were keenly felt at home.
I have early memories of trying to speak to my dad through the TV on Sunday nights while he was away for weeks at a time. Most of the other 60 Minutes children weren’t treated to a weekly sighting: its producers, crew and fixers in faraway places all made the same sacrifices.
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I imagine their families feel similar grief in the wake of the news from CBS, and Washington’s broader attacks on the first amendment. The most trusted and esteemed program in American journalism, the legacy of our loved ones’ hard work and its accompanying sacrifices on the home front, has, in Pelley’s words, been murdered.
Over the years, I’d ask my dad if his occasional sharp criticism of the CBS brass or its sponsors was wise. His usual response was: “What are they going to do? Fire me?” This week we learned that under CBS’s current regime, the answer would be yes. While organizing his papers after his death in 2016, I found copies of letters that if written today would likely threaten his job. “You have ruined this company,” he wrote to Larry Tisch in 1990, a couple of years after Tisch famously slashed the news division’s budget and fired hundreds of staffers in the name of cost-cutting.
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“Our News Divisions Presidents were once statesmen in broadcasting. Today they are sloppy, muddled little errand boys,” he wrote. Fifteen years later, he warned the CEO of CBS that the changes being brought to the newsroom “suggest[s] some form of designer-news, or happy-talk that would by its very nature drive out the kind of information the country needs to have at one of the most dangerous periods in its history.”
Like Pelley, he would have called out the bullies who are decimating the broadcast today. I can imagine him, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, likening the current head of CBS News to a Soviet apparatchik doing the bidding of the central committee.
My father built his reputation as a war correspondent for CBS News. In 1965, he reported on the Marine Corps’ burning of Cam Ne, a Vietnamese village. The scene of a Zippo lighter igniting a thatched roof while defenseless elderly men and women begged for mercy became an iconic image of the US military’s excesses in Vietnam, and is credited with changing the course of the war. When the piece aired, then president Lyndon Johnson accused CBS of “shitting on the American flag”, suggesting that my father, a Canadian, was a traitor and a communist.
Johnson falsely claimed to have evidence of my father’s communist ties and called on Frank Stanton, the head of CBS News, to fire him. Stanton called his bluff, but under our current leadership, both in Washington and at CBS, it’s not hard to imagine that if this happened today, my father’s green card would be revoked and his career at CBS would be finished. That is, if the story even made it on air.
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My dad wasn’t sure about an afterlife and neither am I, but after the decimation of 60 Minutes, I like to imagine that he is still hanging around. To his colleagues’ dismay, he was famous for flouting the rules around smoking. If anyone at CBS News smells smoke in an edit room, or another place they shouldn’t, my dad is surely haunting it, encouraging those who carry on his legacy and, let’s hope, making trouble for the brass.
