An insider’s look behind ‘60 minutes’
LONG-TIME multi-award-winning producer Ira Rosen has written a sometimes sad, often funny, always revealing portrait of American television’s most famous and successful news show “60 Minutes.”
Rosen certainly had reporting time for this book — he was a producer at the CBS show for nearly 25 years.
In anecdotes and conversations, Rosen offers an engaging tutorial on how “60 Minutes’” signature high-quality minidocumentaries are produced but perhaps the book’s most important contribution comes in ratifying the essential role of skilled, tenacious journalism in maintaining a democracy.
In 2007 he produced a piece on how members of Congress sold stock based on information learned in closed meetings — insider trading.
“The more you know about politicians, the worse they appear,” Rosen writes.
Misdeeds of our elected representatives provided a steady stream of story topics for “60 Minutes” in the Rosen years, less so now.
“60 Minutes” emerges as a less-than great place to work, at least in the era of founder Don Hewitt. He shunned staff meetings and essentially let producers and correspondents fight it out for stories and airtime. Correspondent Mike Wallace thrived in that untamed workplace, poaching stories from his fellow correspondents, berating producers and abusing women staffers.
Rosen produced for Wallace for nine years but never truly learned to manage the star correspondent’s outbursts and general bad behavior.
Rosen related how Wallace once barged into Rosen’s office, demanding to know who was on the phone. Rosen said nothing, handed the phone to Wallace and left the room. Rosen had been talking to his mother. Wallace never again interrupted Rosen’s phone calls. And for critics who consider the news media as collectively left-leaning, consider this: In a post-presidency interview with Jimmy Carter, Wallace avoided asking Carter a question the answer to which likely would reflect badly on the Reagans. Wallace was a “friend” of the Reagans.
A fundamental journalism tenet is that a principled reporter cannot be friends with people in their reporting orbit. Rosen produced “60 Minutes” pieces into the Trump presidency, a traumatic time for journalists everywhere. He retired in 2019 and misses the powerful investigative pieces of the program’s glory days.
“We were not dismissed as fake news,” he said. “We solved problems our reporting uncovered crooked congressmen, we got the wrongfully convicted out of prison” (and we) persuaded “whistleblowers, con men and mob bosses to tell their stories.”
CANADIAN Gilbert Cardin worries about the future of the ice road he maintains every winter on a frozen river west of Montreal.
“At some point, it is certain that we will no longer be able to open if these mild winters continue,” he said.
Since February 14, the 900-meter-long path, cleared of snow and marked with fir trees, has allowed motorists to travel between two villages on opposite sides of the Ottawa River without having to drive 40 kilometers roundtrip to the nearest bridge.
Such ice roads — or “winter crossings” as they’re called by Quebec locals — were once commonplace in these parts.
In the 1800s one even carried the weight of locomotives on a temporary rail line across the Saint Lawrence River between the island of Montreal and South Shore communities on the mainland — although one steam engine sank into the river.
In southern parts of Canada, seasonal ice roads are now increasingly scarce due
to wide swings in winter temperatures — from deep freeze to balmy — that make it harder to maintain them. Only a few dozen of these vestiges of winters of yesteryear remain today in all of Canada and just a handful in Quebec.
Cardin’s ice road between PointeFortune and Saint Andrew d’Argenteuil is the only one of three in the Montreal area to open this year.
“This winter we opened a month late,” he said, pointing to global warming and the mild winter start as the cause.
Under a bright blue sky, the 54-year-old big rig truck driver plunges a chainsaw into the ice in the middle of the frozen river. A stream of ice shavings burst out as he cuts out a block of ice and measures its thickness against markings on the blade: 35 centimeters.
It is thick enough to allow cars to drive across the frozen river, but not trucks. In past winters the ice has usually been as much as 1 meter thick.
“At this time of year, we should be seeing 65cm of ice,” he said.
He doesn’t expect to make a profit this year, given his late start and forecasts of an early spring, which will likely force him to close the ice road in a few weeks. In the meantime, he must continually plow it over, as snow cover would keep the ice from thickening (acting as insulation from the cold) at a rate of about 2.5cm per day in cold weather.
“Having an ice bridge open for two months would be an excellent operating season, one month would be very good,” said Claude Desjardins, owner of another ice road further downstream on the river.
He was unable to open his two-kilometer ice road between Hudson and Oka this year, he says, due to “really unsafe” ice conditions. The situation was the same in 2017 and 2018.
“Each year, it’s different and you never know what to expect,” Cardin said.
His crossing, which he’s been operating for 25 years, also remained closed in 2018.
The last decade has seen more frequent warm spells, reducing the average length his ice road is open to an average of five weeks, down from a record 12 weeks in 1997.
He hopes a recent Arctic cold snap will stretch into early March so he can stay open a bit longer, but acknowledges it’s a long shot with the current ice thickness at a bare minimum.
“If the ice is not thicker than that, as soon as the warm weather comes, it’s all over,” he said.