60 Minutes Correspondent Mike Wallace Advises
CUNY Students on Journalism Careers
By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.
Widely hailed as the
preeminent television interviewer in the business, a man
who has asked exacting, soul-baring questions to the world’s
most famous and infamous newsmakers for nearly four decades,
CBS’ 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace shared his views on the “noble
profession of journalism” to a packed auditorium of CUNY
undergraduate students recently. Wallace, who has just embarked
on a multi-city tour for his newly autobiographical Between
You and Me: A Memoir, a retrospective into a distinguished career that began
in radio in the forties and has since earned him 20 Emmy awards,
added yet another accolade to his collection when CUNY Chancellor
Matthew Goldstein presented him with the Chancellor’s
Medal. Noting that only a baker’s dozen of other leaders
has received this award for “exceptional work in shaping
society and influencing important events in our city and beyond” (previous
recipients include Cardinal O’Connor, Jonas Salk, and
Coretta Scott King), Goldstein told Wallace, “You have
elevated and redefined the craft of reporting. You have provided
wake-up calls to society. You teach us to be active and inquisitive
citizens!”
Sponsored by the brand
new CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which will open its
doors in September 2006 with an initial class of 50 students,
Wallace spoke to 800 CUNY undergraduates as part of a media
conference and career fair entitled, “What’s Out There: Journalism, Jobs
and the Brave New World.” Reversing the format for which
he is so lovingly known on 60 Minutes, Wallace
sat across from former CBS anchor/reporter David Diaz, who
is now a City College lecturer, and answered a series of tough
questions. “I don’t have an anchor’s face.
I’m a trifle irreverent, abrasive, and nosy, and I’ve
made a virtue out of necessity,” laughed Wallace when
asked how he “became the guy who makes people squirm.” Wallace
went on to discuss the tools of his trade. “Research,
research, research. I learn as much about my interviewees as
possible ahead of time, so that when I sit down with them,
they become co-conspirators, because they know that I know
a great deal about them,” explained Wallace. Wallace
further urged his young audience to “be sure of the accuracy
and fairness of your facts,” in reference to CBS’ 2004
scandal where Dan Rather and others were unable to authenticate
documents that implicated President Bush as the recipient of
preferential treatment in the National Guard because of the
political importance of his father, George Bush Senior.
True
to form, Wallace quickly took off the velvet gloves when
Diaz asked him why he has never interviewed President George
W. Bush. (Wallace has interviewed every other U.S. President
and many First Ladies.) “Well, he doesn’t like me,” Wallace
quipped back, adding that “I have never met the U.S.
President because Mr. Rove has stood in the way. They don’t
trust the press, and they feel that my attitude would be
insufficiently deferential.” What would he ask the
President if given the opportunity, asked Diaz? “I
would ask him, ‘What prepares a person to be the CEO
of the biggest superpower of the world?’” Wallace
shot back irreverently. Wallace was equally derisive about
America’s current occupation of Iraq, adding that “Afghanistan
would have been an understandable war…but there was
no imminent threat in Iraq. We should have been able to get
him [Saddam Hussein] out of there without ‘shock and
awe’…No one thought through an exit strategy.
When was that war going to be won?”
Noting that President
Bush is not the only person who distrusts the press today,
Diaz, citing statistics indicating that journalists are rated
below congressmen, queried Wallace on what is wrong with
today’s press. The biggest problem,
answered Wallace, is that “people are looking for ‘infotainment’.
Tabloid, or hype, news is what we get today. The ‘suits’ are
just trying to build up their circulation.” Equally harmful,
continued Wallace, is the tendency toward biased news, with
networks like Fox, where Wallace’s own son works on the
Sunday night news, are satisfying “the public’s
yearning for something different from what was perceived to
be the liberal line of the predictable left wing press.”
When
Wallace completed his interview to the standing ovation of
the young CUNY students, swarms of would-be journalists marched
up to get another word with their icon, who seemed to be
in no immediate hurry to leave the auditorium. Indeed, Wallace—octogenarian,
world-renowned TV correspondent, and now author—appeared
to be at the top of his game as he continued holding court
with the next generation of the press.#
