| Long before people carried supercomputers in their back pockets, television was still capable of providing novelty. On this day in 1968, a new kind of news show, called “60 Minutes,” made its début on CBS. “It’s a kind of a magazine for television,” the soothing host Harry Reasoner said during the première. Mike Wallace, another host, waxed nearly poetic about the way human perception “roams” and about TV as the latest platform for sharing stories about the world. Fourteen years later, the Sunday news series—an hour-long mélange of documentary shorts that covered subjects from school busing to venereal herpes—had become a national institution, as popular as football and competing for the top spot in the ratings with the hit drama “Dallas.” In a Profile of the show and its producer, Don Hewitt, the writer E. J. Kahn describes scenes of newsroom maneuvering that would have been at home in films such as “Network” or “Broadcast News.” Hewitt, who liked theatricality, big ratings, and being “a winner,” occasionally referred to his starry, besuited reporters as his tigers, Kahn reported, and to the offices they occupied as tiger cages. A behind-the-scenes glimpse of a budding medium, the Profile also identifies a possible turning point in our declining attention spans. Hewitt saw his audience at the time as hungry for information yet with low commitment to TV. He developed “60 Minutes” into what the president of CBS News called a “candy factory” of news drama, inventing the kind of can’t-look-away infotainment that paved the way for the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Larry King, and even TMZ and news on TikTok. “I look at stuff like this and I’m in awe,” Hewitt said, while watching his own show. “I sit here the way Harry Winston must have sat when he looked at a diamond.” | 
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