Here is an excerpt from a “classic” article, written by E. J. Kahn, and published by The New Yorker (July 12, 1982). To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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This is the first part of a two-part article. Please click here to read the second part.

Ed Sullivan, who in his heyday affected Americans’ Sunday looking-and-listening habits almost as much as the Bible does, would scarcely have believed it. Sullivan—like Milton Berle, like Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and other unchallengeable early claimants to niches in any television hall of fame—specialized in pure entertainment. So, with one notable exception, has every other ongoing television offering that has achieved conspicuous audience ratings of a size to make advertisers sit up and shell out. The exception is “60 Minutes,” a fourteen-year-old phenomenon of the medium which since 1978, after establishing itself in CBS’s Sunday 7-8 p.m. East Coast time slot, has been the only non-entertainment series consistently to attract a vast and seemingly unflagging following, not to mention some fairly sharp criticism and a number of lawsuits, including one that has come to the attention of the United States Supreme Court.

It is not hard to persuade people who have something to say or sell to appear on “60 Minutes”—an hour-long mélange of short documentaries, features, commentary, and sometimes even news, its varying-length episodes featuring Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner, and Ed Bradley, who this past season took the place of Dan Rather. Reasoner, who has been a star of the show, on and off, since its inception, has chatted with the Pope in the Vatican. Reasoner also once had an amiable chat with some folk who were afflicted with venereal herpes and were glad to talk on camera about it. (It was a moment held by some television buffs to be almost as touching as the time Mike Wallace, a permanent fixture, appeared with a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter to inform the world that the little girl had been impregnated by her stepfather.) “People will come out of the woodwork for ‘60 Minutes,’ ” Reasoner says, “partly out of their belief that if there’s something wrong in their life Mike Wallace can fix it.”

Last season, while Reasoner was in Scotland to film a segment of the program, he was asked by a native in an Ancient Urquhart kilt what show he worked for. On being told, the Scot said, “I’ll drop my girlfriend in the States a wee note and tell her to watch that.”

“She probably does already,” said Reasoner.

Not all Americans do—only about forty million of them each week. Wallace was on location in Fairbanks, Alaska, some years ago and dropped in at a television station while an announcer was reading the evening regional news. During a break for a commercial, the local man thought it would give his audience a real charge—probably make the station’s switchboard blaze like northern lights—if the celebrity from the Lower Forty-Eight read the next block of copy. Wallace was happy to oblige. As far as Wallace knows, there was no discernible reaction, conceivably because he hadn’t sternly rebuked the evening news for not coming clean about whatever it was that it was doubtless trying to conceal from him.

During the 1979-80 television season, “60 Minutes” outdrew the lathery serial “Dallas,” and the two CBS programs have been contentedly jostling for the topmost ratings ever since. During the season that ended in April, the proprietors of “Dallas” were asking from advertisers, and getting, a hundred and seventy thousand dollars for thirty seconds of air time. “60 Minutes,” which has six minutes available for commercials, got a hundred and seventy-five thousand for thirty seconds. While the show is under way, restaurant employees who might at that hour normally expect to be staggering under trays can minister to their arches. “By now, people are arranging their Sunday lives for us,” it was recently asserted, without documentation but with satisfaction, by Don Hewitt, who orchestrated “60 Minutes” when it began, in 1968, and has been conducting it ever since. Hewitt professes to have an ear—both his ears are surmounted by a carefully teased coiffure—that is delicately attuned to the vox populi. “People talk about Ronald and Nancy Reagan and Alexander Haig and Billie Jean and Reggie and what was on ‘60 Minutes’ last week,” he likes to say, sometimes varying his dramatis personae but never his conclusion. “People will say, ‘O.K., we’ll go to Grandma’s for lunch on Sunday, but we have to be home and eat supper at six so we’ll be ready for Mike and Morley and the rest of the gang.’ Why, in Hollywood, I understand, people say to each other, ‘Do we watch at your house or mine?’ ”

Hewitt and his wife, ABC’s United Nations correspondent Marilyn Berger, usually watch at their home—either the city one, on Central Park South, or the country one, in Southampton. By any given Sunday, the paterfamilias, whose “60 Minutes” title is executive producer, will have seen most of the bits and pieces of that evening’s divertissement many times over. Looking at “60 Minutes,” in full or in part, has roughly the impact on Hewitt that standing at the edge of an unruffled pool had on Narcissus. Upon learning that a visitor to his office (framed on a table is a letter to Hewitt from William S. Paley, the doyen of CBS, extolling “60 Minutes” as “the most successful news series in television history”) had somehow lamentably neglected to see one Morley Safer episode a couple of years earlier, Hewitt tenderly inserted a cassette in his videotape machine, inserted an unlit cigar the size of a small vaulting pole in his mouth, and sat down to savor blissfully one of the fruits of his labors. “I look at stuff like this and I’m in awe,” Hewitt said. “I sit here the way Harry Winston must have sat when he looked at a diamond.”

At home, on Sunday evenings, Hewitt is happiest when he can scrutinize his jewels in a room full of friends. “I like to observe when their interest flags and when they perk up,” he says. “Where’s our competition? It’s not on the other channels. It’s the distractions in the household. The phone ringing, the dog barking, the neighbor at the door—that’s our competition. When Marilyn and I happen to be home alone, I get very edgy if she’s not out of the kitchen in time for the opening. It’s terrible if there’s nobody in the room when I say ‘Watch this! It’s terrific!’ Television is not like the movies. When you go to a movie, you make a commitment. Your dinner is over, you’ve paid your admission, the lights go out, you have only one place to look. If the movie’s no good, you don’t walk out. I can’t name anybody who’s walked out of five movies in his life. The worst thing you do is to turn to your companion and say, ‘Jesus, why are we here?’ But with television there’s no such commitment. People may walk out of ten shows a night. The thing you have to remember in this business is that you have no captive audience. Nobody has paid to see your show. Nobody has hired a babysitter just for you. I sometimes say that if in the middle of ‘60 Minutes’ a kid gets up and says ‘Daddy, will you help me with my homework?’ and Daddy says ‘Yes,’ I’m a loser, but if Daddy says ‘Wait till this is over,’ I’ve won. The most soul-searing experience I can imagine would be if somebody was watching the show with Marilyn and me and in the middle of it asked to have his drink freshened and somebody else got up and went and did it.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

WIKI Bio:

Ely Jacques Kahn Jr. (December 4, 1916 – May 28, 1994) was an American writer with The New Yorker for five decades.

Born in New York City, he was the son of architect Ely Jacques Kahn, and the brother of mystery editor and anthologist Joan Kahn. He attended the Horace Mann School and Harvard University, where he took his B.A. in 1937. He was hired by St. Clair McKelway at The New Yorker in 1937^[2] and his first byline appeared there in the April 3, 1937 issue. Before World War II, he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945. The New Yorker publishing 39 of his pieces on Army life that were later collected in book form.

His long career with the magazine resulted in numerous books on such varied subjects as Coca-Cola, Lesley J. McNair, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, Harvard University, Herbert Bayard Swope, Frank Sinatra, Dwayne O. Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland, and the Postal Inspection Service. However, his multi-part series on grain, which was published in book form as “Staffs of Life” in 1985, was criticized by some as an example of the self-indulgent journalism that marked The New Yorker during the 1970s and ’80s.