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DECEMBER 2005

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.#

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