For the first time in a long time, “60 Minutes” blinked. Always arrogantly resistant to change, the 28-year-old program will finally accede to a few format changes over the coming months. The taping schedule will be pushed back to accommodate late-breaking news. And three new commentators are joining the cast: cranky liberal humorist Molly Ivins, cranky conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke and cranky African-American essayist Stanley Crouch. They’ll be dueling in the style of “Point/Counterpoint,” the old “60 Minutes” crossfires that Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin parodied on “Saturday Night Live” with the phrase “Jane, you ignorant slut!” Executive producer Don Hewitt denies that these changes are a reaction to the new kids on the block. “There are a lot of things on my radar screen,” Hewitt says, blaming his softening ratings on the loss of the football lead-in to Fox in 1993 and CBS’s weakened affiliates. Last on his list is “a little imperceptible blip called “Dateline’.”
That blip accounted for 40 percent of NBC News’s $100 million profit last year. “Dateline” has recovered from the exploding-GM-truck scandal of three years ago. The producers responsible were fired and Neal Shapiro was recruited from ABC to run the show. At 38, Shapiro is a TV baby. A fanatical Trekkie, he’s even made over the set to look like the bridge of the Enterprise. Unlike “60 Minutes,” which has a reverence for the scripted word, “Dateline” is all about images: “pictures of the week” and consumer reports with alarmist flashing-siren logos. The multinight format is the show’s strength and weakness. Stories that shouldn’t get on do (“Are you paying too much for your contact lenses?”), just to fill the air time. But when a huge event like the Oklahoma City bombing happens, “Dateline” is all over it. Says Shapiro, “We put the news back in news magazines.”
How the two shows are gearing up for Sunday’s broadcast reveals how different they are. Insiders at “Dateline” say the directive to staffers is, “If it moves, shoot it.” At “60 Minutes,” the mood is calmer, bordering on complacency. “They’ve been riding high for so long, there’s a real arrogance over there,” says a former “60 Minutes” producer. “People are not running around frantically talking about getting their act together.” Mike Wallace, 77, can joke that the age of his colleagues “skews toward over-the-hill,” but argues that it makes them “wiser.” Safer was in Vietnam; Ed Bradley and Lesley Stahl covered the White House. “That number of miles,” Wallace says, “is bound to give you a better perspective on any report or profile.” Except for the tobacco whistle-blower debacle (an expose almost squashed by CBS management), this has been a good season for “60 Minutes.” The ratings have scored in the top 10. And there are some stories that only “60 Minutes” can pull off. It’s hard to imagine the immaculately coifed Stone Phillips reporting a piece on prison rape. Nor do sleazy businessmen start sweating when they hear Jane Pauley is coming to pay them a call.
“Dateline” has gone up against an established news mag before. It beat “PrimeTime Live” nine out of 11 times when they were both on Thursday night. The likely scenario this time round is that both sides declare victory. “Dateline” siphons a small portion of the “60 Minutes” viewers, but “60 Minutes” can still call itself the premier news magazine on television. Don Hewitt says it would be a bad idea to try to make his aging show more “hep.” Maybe. But somebody should tell him nobody uses that word anymore.
