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The Year In Review

Jeffrey Wigand -- The Man Who Revealed The Limits Of Don Hewitt's TeleStory Packaging

The funny story to me … is the executive producer said to me when I came back, “What shall we call this story?” I said, “How about ‘Hezbollah’?” “No, no, no.” “How about ‘Terrorist’?” “No, no, no.” He said, “How long were you there?” And I said, “Oh, I was there, like, fourteen days.” And I knew what was coming and I said, “And I went to Balbek, and I almost got killed. And we got chased around. We have all this footage.” The footage is not on the show. The reason it wasn’t on the show is Mike wasn’t there… And he says, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. Nobody cares about you. How long was Mike there?” “Three days.” Title: “Three Days in Beirut.” So the form, or the structural form, defines the content.

Lowell Bergman
Former Producer, CBS News/60 Minutes

New York

Published: September, 15, 2009
By Robert Butche

60 Minutes vs. Big Tobacco

In 1966, CBS’ 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman oversaw reporting on a complex story about big tobacco. The investigation spanned many months in part because so much of it was concealed by those involved and in part because telling complex stories is not easily accomplished. The heart of the story was something most America’s long suspected — that the nation’s giant tobacco companies were knowingly marketing an addictive drug ( nicotine ).

Lowell Bergman, UC Berkeley, Former 60 Minutes Producer

TeleStory Ingredients

• Event, happening or person of interest
• Storyline that emphasizes a person’s involvement
• A Storyteller who is familiar and believable
• Video that connects storyteller to the storyline
• Narrative voiceover in which the storyteller reads the story
• No graphic blandishment or tags

Bergman served as senior producer for 60 Minutes’ most respected senior up-front personality, Mike Wallace, who had been part of Don Hewitt’s 60 Minutes unit since the program’s creation in 1968. The tobacco story Bergman was developing was about how tobacco companies knowingly and intentionally marketed cigarettes to attract young people while also formulating their brands to enhance their habituating qualities.

Bergman’s research, interviews, and other materials were immensely powerful. What made the story he produced so credible was insider information from a former vice president at Brown and Williamson Tobacco company, Jeffrey Wigand — a former scientist at Brown and Williamson — makers of Kool and Lucky Strike brand cigarettes.

Having a star witness was just one of several problems arising from Bergman’s work. Another was Wigand’s whistle-blower role which cast him the story teller — something that ran against Don Hewitt’s 60 Minutes format which awards the up-front personality the omnipotent voice as if he or she were a real reporter.

But Bergman’s materials were constructed around Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist who earned a Ph.D degree in endocrinology and biochemistry at the University of Buffalo, explaining what happened at Brown and Williamson and what it meant in scientific terms.

Sticking To The Form

Whatever it is called, Don Hewitt’s storyline-driven format consists of standard elements ( see sidebar ) which are used in every package ( the assembled and edited materials ready for broadcast ). Bergman’s big tobacco story was not the first to be conformed for its story telling, or entertainment values regardless of how doing so might alter or degrade the journalistic qualities or fidelity-to-fact issues.

Lowell Bergman well understood that to air, his finished package had to conform to Hewitt’s form — something he could accomplish by how he worked Mike Wallace into the story as well as by footage of Wallace interviewing Wigand. Sticking to the form is what comprises a 60 Minutes story. To some, including insiders, Hewitt’s formula is called the form, but it has many other names including TeleStory ( television story telling ) which is used by Newsroom Magazine to more fully describe its most essential quality — described by Don Hewitt as tell me a story.

CBS Censorship

The form issues may have changed, to some degree, how Jeffrey Wigand’s whistle-blower story was packaged, but as its air date neared, CBS found Lowell Bergman’s materials at odds with CBS’ corporate interests. At a time when CBS was about to be sold, Jeffrey Wigand’s revelation that tobacco companies, much the same as today’s insurance companies and banks, do bad things while pretending to be innocent, carried risks of lawsuits by the well-heeled tobacco companies that might adversely affect CBS value.

The outcome of these issues was a decision by CBS’ legal department to order that Bergman and Wallace’s full-hour program not be aired. The events leading up to and after CBS’s decision not to air have been extensively covered elsewhere and dramatized in a movie, The Insider, in which Wigand was played by Russel Crowe and Bergman by Al Pacino.

Matters Of Trust

Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, Russel Crowe, Al Pacino, Lowell Bergman

For some, 60 Minutes lost its edginess when Hewitt agreed to cancel the Bergman-Wallace report. Hewitt, Wallace and CBS survived the scandal, but the fall out left 60 Minutes’ impeccable reputation seriously tarnished. Outsiders cannot know how, or to what degree, the Wigand debacle might have damaged Hewitt’s willingness to attack the big and the powerful.

What we know today is that Don Hewitt’s successor at 60 Minutes, Jeff Fager, shows no signs of giving an inch on 60 Minutes research quality. What we don’t know is whether CBS is likely to make a similar mistake down the road or for that matter how Jeff Fager would handle such a demand.

60 Minutes
Production Staff

• Senior Producers:
  Debbie Deluca-Sheh
  Michael Radutzky
• Executive Story Editor
  Victoria Gordon
• Producers:
  Robert Anderson
  Tom Anderson
  Shachar Bar-On
  Richard Bonin
  David Browning
  Denise Cetta
  Reid Collins, Jr.
  Andrew Court
  Kyra Darnton
  L. Franklin Devine
  Shawn Efran
  Shari Finkelstein
  Michael Gavshon
  David Gelber
  Solly Granatstein
  John Hamlin
  Graham Messick
  Draggan Mihailovich
  Deirdre Naphin
  Catherine Olian
  Harry A. Radliffe II
  Ira Rosen
  David Schneider
  Henry Schuster
  Tanya Simon
  Ruth Streeter
  Karen Sughrue
• Associate Producers:
  Sumi Aggarwal
  Joel Bach
  Diane Beasley
  Susie Bieber
  Anya Bourg
  Rebecca Chertok
  Susan Cipollaro
  Joyce Cordero
  Jenny Dubin
  Meghan Frank
  Jennie Held
  Catherine Herrick
  Julie Holstein
  Michael Karzis
  Sara Kuzmarov
  Magalie Laguerre
  Rebecca Liss
  Kathy Liu
  Jennifer MacDonald
  Drew Magratten
  Andrew Metz
  Jeff Newton
  Rebecca Peterson
  Daniel Ruetenik
  Keith Sharman
  Nathalie Sommer
  Katy Textor
  Kara Vaccaro
  Nicole Young
• Directors:
  Robert Klug
  Alicia Tanz Flaum

Bergman On The Form

In January, 2001, Lowell Bergman, spoke with Harry Kreisler at a UC Berkeley event about his thoughts on Hewitt’s success and the form he used for producing 60 Minutes packages. Here’s some of that dialogue.

Harry Kreisler: Lowell, explain to me what you mean by “the form.” You’re going to tape an interview that is going to be shown on television as is? Is that what you mean by the form or … ?

Lowell Bergman: I mean that if you’re working for 60 Minutes and you can’t get a correspondent, an on-camera personality, in the other chair with the person being interviewed — and it could be the greatest interview potential in the world — you can’t do it.

Harry Kreisler: I see.

Lowell Bergman: So the form or the program, the storytelling form of the program, defines what interview you can do on camera. I might be able to do a hundred other interviews leading up to the on-camera interview, without the on-camera person, or I might be able to do some of the minor interviews that just help inform the show, and videotape those (or film them, in the old days), and insert that somewhere in the story.

But, an example, in the Hezbollah story, we spent some time in Balbek in northern Lebanon, which is considered the world headquarters of both terrorism and counterfeiting, and a big drug nexus. We almost got killed, just because of things you couldn’t plan for — two camera crews, myself, and my old friend Jim Hogan — running around. Now, Mike Wallace never made it there. He was in Beirut.

The funny story to me, to give you [an example of the power of] the form, is the executive producer said to me when I came back, “What shall we call this story?” Which is about to go on the air. I said, “How about ‘Hezbollah’?” “No, no, no.” “How about ‘Terrorist’?” “No, no, no.” He said, “How long were you there?” And I said, “Oh, I was there, like, fourteen days.” And I knew what was coming and I said, “And I went to Balbek, and I almost got killed. And we got chased around. We have all this footage.” The footage is not on the show. The reason it wasn’t on the show is Mike wasn’t there, and etc. And he says, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. Nobody cares about you. How long was Mike there?” “Three days.” Title: “Three Days in Beirut.” So the form, or the structural form, defines the content.

What One Sees Is Not What It Appears

Lowell Bergman: “It’s the form that we in the United States have come to understand when we watch television and get information from television. And when it’s not in that form, we either get confused or bored. And so it’s the form that you have to work inside of. It involves everything like the correspondent being on camera, and the characterization of the correspondent: They never lose an argument. They never mispronounce a word. They appear to be the reporter. You never see any of the other people around.

Occasionally, you do, and that’s a big revelation when they show that, because we sat down with so and so, and you could see some of the lights or something. The audience knows that there are other people involved, just like when you go the movies. But that’s what it is, it’s a movie. It’s a movie within a certain form. And that limits what you learn about. Hewitt’s been up front about it, he won’t put anybody on camera who says “axed.”

Harry Kreisler: Axed means …

Lowell Bergman: Meaning any black person who speaks inner-city lingo, because they’re hard to understand. And 60 Minutes is based as a show form on the audio, actually, interestingly enough; you can follow the whole thing by listening to it. You don’t necessarily have to look at the pictures. It’s a small-screen format, in that sense, going back to the sixties. And rarely with any subtitles. Never any kyrons, you know, everyone’s always ID’d verbally. So, it’s a form. And this form is never explained to the audience. You don’t learn it in school. They won’t tell you about it. I’ve tried to get them to do it.

Comfort: A Form Of No History

Harry Kreisler: But it works; why? Because things change, because you get big audiences, or what?

Lowell Bergman: “It makes it easier for you to understand a story. For example, in the style of 60 Minutes, there’s rarely any history in a story. You will rarely see old footage or a section that explains the story you are about to see. So history, in a sense, stands still; time stands still. That may not be true at NBC. Dateline, sometimes, for instance, in a magazine format, will show you some older footage, and so will ABC. Different operations have different forms. But this becomes a way of identifying both the information and the programming, and tuning in again. It’s comfortable. You watch at 7 o’clock on Sundays, and you get your three pieces of “real information.”

Fager’s 60 Minutes — As Good As Ever

On October 26th, 2008 60 Minutes aired a segment entitled Financial WMDs that addressed the misdeeds of Wall Street, bankers, insurance companies and federal regulatory agencies. In that story, Frank Partnoy, a Professor of Law and Finance at the University Of San Diego spoke to the issues directly and in clear language. So clear, that this 60 Minutes report helped to clear the fog that has largely obscured reality by identifying the instruments, people and institutions who effectively brought down Wall Street, banking and millions of American jobs.

While this is not the only timely story aired in the recent season, it demonstrates how 60 Minutes under Jeff Fager has retained the most powerful story telling elements in Don Hewitt’s form, yet added immediacy and a degree of substance sufficient to attract viewers in increasing numbers. To fully appreciate what Fager has accomplished requires some understanding of his focus on timeliness and substance as well as making the best possible use of Don Hewitt’s TeleStory construct.

Now, as 60 Minutes begins its new season, take a moment to examine the names of the people who do the work, run down sources, check the facts and pull together America’s first, and still best, television news magazine.