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Marilyn Berger Hewitt '56, and her husband, Don Hewitt, are introduced Oct. 12 in the Alice Cook House. The Hewitts spoke about their careers as journalists. Copyright © Cornell University

In the 23 years that Don Hewitt produced the TV news magazine he created, "60 Minutes," the show made $2.5 billion in commercial revenues and kept CBS afloat. The show, however, Hewitt believes, is a "freak" in a television world dominated by entertainment values and money.

Hewitt, with his wife, New York Times contributor Marilyn Berger Hewitt '56, reflected on their lives as journalists at the Alice Cook House Oct. 12.

Both Hewitts agreed that the problem with television today is its determination to focus on demographics.

"Demographics have taken over a lot. ... They [the networks] need to make the money." Don Hewitt said, "I think the American people might be the best informed people in the world, but this audience here is not part of the television audience they are after because you are probably too intelligent to watch television. That's what happens when you live in a capitalist society."

He reflected on his 50-plus years at CBS News and how he started at the old New York Herald Tribune, first as a copy boy then as a World War II correspondent. When he decided to get into television, his boss predicted that "television is a fad; it won't last." Said Hewitt, "He was half right. It was a fad, but it lasted, and miraculously so have I." But, he added, "What CBS employed me to do never struck me as work."

Copyright © Cornell University

Don Hewitt, creator of "60 Minutes," speaks about the future of news, Oct. 12 at Cook House.

Over the years, his TV experiences included directing CBS News' coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey in 1952 and the first-ever televised presidential debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960.

He said that he has frequently been asked why he did not hire more women. "The answer is, I didn't hire women, and I didn't hire men, I hired reporters. It's just that during the time I ran '60 Minutes,' women were only beginning to become the top-notch reporters they have now become."

As the first female diplomatic correspondent of The Washington Post, Marilyn Berger Hewitt was evidently one of those reporters. She graduated from Cornell in the mid-1950s, an era when, in her words, "a woman was told that if she were interested in science, she should marry a doctor."

Reflecting on the future of print media, Marilyn Hewitt speculated that newspapers could all go online, but that there is a big difference between news on the Internet and news from an online newspaper, which is "carefully edited and put together with a sense of what is important."

Her husband, on the other hand, said he believed that eventually there will be no newspapers because broadcasting serves everything that newspapers do. When asked about the future of "60 Minutes," he said, "the new team is great, and I don't think '60 Minutes' will shame anyone who was there at the beginning."

Zheng Yang is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.