Career At CBS News
Soon he received a lucrative offer at the CBS television network, which was seeking someone who had "picture experience" to help with production of television broadcast. Hewitt started at its news division, CBS News, in 1948 and served as producer-director of the network's evening-news broadcast with Douglas Edwards for fourteen years. He was also the first director of See It Now, co-produced by host Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly that started in 1952; his use of "two film projectors cutting back and forth breaks up the monotony of a talking head, improves editing, and shapes future news broadcasts." In 1956, Hewitt was the only one to capture on film the final moments of the SS Andrea Doria as it sank and disappeared under the water.
Hewitt directed the televised production of the 1960 U.S. Presidential candidate debates between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy; they were the first presidential-candidate debates ever televised. He later became executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, helming the famous broadcast of John F. Kennedy's assassination as the story developed.
He then launched the eight-time Emmy Award-winning show 60 Minutes. Within ten years, the show reached the top 10 in viewership, a position it maintained for 21 of the following 22 seasons, until the 1999-2000 season.
Hewitt was a primary figure in the 1996 tobacco-industry scandal involving tobacco company Brown & Williamson and 60 Minutes. The scandal was the inspiration for the 1999 film The Insider: Hewitt was portrayed in the film by Philip Baker Hall.
Declining ratings at 60 Minutes—after decades of being in the top 10 the show had dropped in rankings to number 20—contributed to what became a public debate in 2002 about whether it was time for CBS to replace Hewitt at 60 Minutes. According to The New York Times, Jeff Fager, producer of 60 Minutes II, was being floated as a possible replacement, speculation that proved to be accurate. The show was still generating an estimated profit of more than $20 million a year, but the decline in viewership and profit meant the show could no longer "operate as an island unto itself, often thumbing its nose at management while demanding huge salaries and perquisites." Within a couple of years, Hewitt stepped aside as executive producer at the age of 81, signing a ten-year contract with CBS to be an executive producer-at-large for CBS News.
In January 2010, 60 Minutes dedicated an entire show to the story and memory of Don Hewitt.
Read more about this topic: Don Hewitt
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