Don Hewitt: TV Innovator, For Better Or Worse

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Don Hewitt,who died this past week at age 86 of pancreatic cancer, was best known as the creator of 60 Minutes, the TV newsmagazine that's still ticking after 41 years. That part of the story has already been told better by other people, and by the broadcast itself. What we want to do here is to focus on some of the other ways Hewitt impacted television, for better or worse, during his long career at CBS News.

• Hewitt introduced the technique of superimposing words at the bottom of the screen during early TV newscasts. That is, when a picture of a news figure appears on screen, you see the words "Senator Miles Smith, (R) Minnesota". Or when the reporter appears, it's usually "Mary Jones, Channel 6 News". How ironic, then, that 60 Minutes has never used graphics to identify people or places.
• The first televised presidential debate in 1960 between Democrat John Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon was produced and directed by Hewitt. The nature of politics is changed forever as Kennedy's youthful and confident appearance clashed with Nixon looking like he had just come in off the street, and was cited as the deciding factor in JFK's victory.
• The use of hidden cameras and ambush interviews to ferret out information from small-time con artists and other reluctant participants was a one-time staple of 60 Minutes, and was soon copied by every other news magazine and local newscast. Hewitt dropped them when he figured out that (A) the tactic was being overused, and (B) people were getting wise to them anyhow.
• Hewitt inflicted commentator Andy Rooney on an unsuspecting world.

But most of all, Don Hewitt was a man who cared about television journalism, what he and his team put together on the air every week, and in the way you saw the news at home. We don't know what TV journalism will look like in the future, but Hewitt left behind a blueprint for others to follow.