Fellow journalists honour Safer
TORONTO • Morley Safer became entrenched in the U.S. but never lost his Canadian sensibility, said fellow journalists in honouring the “remarkable career” of the Toronto-born 60 Minutes correspondent who died Thursday. He was 84.
It was a special quality that gave him an edge while reporting on major news events including the Vietnam War, which launched his career to another level, said former PBS journalist Robert MacNeil, who grew up in Halifax and knew Safer.
“He had that little bit of ironic distance that Canadians have about the United States,” said MacNeil, during an interview from New York.
“He was the best of the best.”
CTV chief correspondent and W5 host Lloyd Robertson called him a “legend” for his intrepid reporting in Vietnam.
“I think he probably was the one who — more than any other reporter on the scene at the time — was responsible for making the story what it became: which was a huge news story for the last half of the decade.”
Safer began his career at several news organizations in Canada and England — including the CBC — before being hired by Reuters in its London bureau.
He also reported for nine years out of the CBC’s London bureau before he was hired by CBS News, where he would work for the rest of his career.
The winner of 12 Emmy Awards and three Peabody awards, Safer was the third correspondent hired for 60 Minutes, after Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner.
For CBS News, Safer influenced public opinion against the Vietnam War with his report on Cam Ne, a Vietnamese village burned to the ground by U.S. Marines. For 60 Minutes, which he joined in 1970, he skewered modern art, chronicled a tango craze in Finland, visited a home in Milan for aging opera singers and helped free a wrongly convicted man from a life sentence behind bars.
“Morley has a great eye for stories, both the hard-edged and the soft-hearted, and certainly the offbeat,” Don Hewitt, the founder of 60 Minutes, wrote in his 2001 memoir.
Dapper in patterned shirts and colourful ties, Safer carried the cosmopolitan air of the roving foreign correspondent he once was. Well into the wordprocessing age he insisted on composing his stories on a manual Royal typewriter, which he said produced copy “that has some relationship to my humanity,” according to a USA Today profile in 2000.
“Morley can cover war in Beirut in a navy blazer, white slacks and a pocket square and report it as if he were reporting on a cocktail party or a croquet match,” said Steve Kroft, one of his many colleagues over his four decades on the show, according to USA Today.