’60 Minutes’ pioneer Mike Wallace dies at age 93
Posted April 8, 2012 10:45 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Mike Wallace, a major pioneer in American broadcasting, has died at the age of 93.
As one of the original correspondents and hosts of ’60 Minutes,” Wallace was best known for his ambush-interview technique and confrontational on-air style.
Wallace died Saturday night, CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said.
Until he was slowed by heart surgery as he neared his 90th birthday in 2008, Wallace continued making news, doing ’60 Minutes’ interviews with such subjects as Jack Kevorkian and Roger Clemens.
He had promised to still do occasional reports when he announced his retirement as a regular correspondent in March 2006.
Among his later contributions, after bowing out as a regular, was a May 2007 profile of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and an interview with Kevorkian, the assisted suicide doctor released from prison in June 2007 who died June 3, 2011, at age 83.
In December 2007, Wallace landed the first interview with Clemens after the star pitcher was implicated in the Mitchell report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The interview, in which Clemens maintained his innocence, was broadcast in early January 2008.
Wallace was the first man hired when late CBS news producer Don Hewitt put together the staff of ’60 Minutes’ at its inception in 1968. The show wasn’t a hit at first, but it worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and remained there, season after season, with Wallace as one of its mainstays. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in TV journalism.
The top 10 streak was broken in 2001, in part due to the onset of huge-drawing rated reality shows. But “60 Minutes” remained in the top 25 in recent years, ranking 15th in viewers in the 2010-11 season.
The show pioneered the use of “ambush interviews,” with reporter and camera crew corralling alleged wrongdoers in parking lots, hallways, wherever a comment – or at least a stricken expression -might be harvested from someone dodging the reporters’ phone calls.
Such tactics were phased out over time, as Wallace said they provided drama but not much good information.
Wallace was born Myron Wallace on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Mass. He began his news career in Chicago in the 1940s, first as radio news writer for the Chicago Sun and then as reporter for WMAQ. He started at CBS in 1951.
He was married four times. In 1986, he wed Mary Yates Wallace, the widow of his close friend and colleague, Ted Yates, who had died in 1967. Besides his wife, Wallace is survived by his son, Chris, a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora, and stepson Eames Yates.
