At the height of its popularity in the 1979-80 season, CBS's 'newsmagazine' 60 Minutes -- a mainstay since 1968-- drew an average audience of 28 million households each Sunday night -- quite a bit more than a quarter of the US population at the time. While it's never been lower than 26th in ratings and is still regularly in the top 20 shows each week its viewership has steadily declined in number over the years. In this more fragmented age it now hovers around 10 million viewers a week or about 3% of the US. Which doesn't really answer the question - who is still watching 60 Minutes and why? I ask myself this whenever the TV drifts by accident to CBS on Sunday night subjecting me for whatever length of time to the patented 60 Minutes sterilization of whatever subject it is treating.
From the beginning, 60 Minutes stories have fallen neatly into a handful of antiseptic categories, many of them demonstrated as recently as this season. Among the themes: You Can't Turn Your Back on them for a Second (e.g. a 2021 story on a CDC scandal around an early COVID cruise); The price of peace is war (Ukraine resistance fighters and a legless Navy SEAL mountain climber); It's a Dangerous World but We Got This (John Bolton on Iran); Explain the young people to grandma (Greta Gerwig on the Barbie Movie); My success is your victory (Sandra Day O'Connor remembrance); Gee whiz! (AI and 3D printed homes but also winemaking Georgian monks); They're not so bad (Green conservative Wyoming governor; and speaking of Green how about Marjorie Taylor Green?) and the perennial favorite Not Dead Yet (Red Hot Chili Peppers; Nicolas Cage).
On a recent Sunday night, 60 Minutes tackled Israel's bombing of Gaza in response to the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel in its typical fashion, by talking about something else. Anticipating the strategic distraction of the then immanent exhibition of Congress's grilling of University Presidents about reports of rising Anti-Semitism on campus, in this case it was the different ways in which the conflict was playing out at 2 Ivy League campuses, Columbia and Dartmouth. On the larger, urban, more liberal campus of Columbia, the discussion was itself a conflict between 2 opposing student groups both against each other and against the University. At rural, bucolic, smaller and more conservative Dartmouth, the conflict was being focus grouped by the department of Middle Eastern Studies (whose chair is notably an Egyptian-- one of 2 Arab states with full diplomatic relations with Israel) in partnership with the Jewish Studies program.
At one point, the reporter Bill Whitaker asks the business school assistant professor leading the pro-Israeli faction at Columbia in its protests against anti-Israeli speech on campus and against the university's refusal to condemn the Hamas attacks (as it has not condemned the disproportionate death and destruction being perpetrated by Israel on Gaza) if he had been reprimanded by the university for his outspokenness; to which the professor non-replied, "I have not done anything wrong." In essence, 60 Minutes was doing what it does quite often: dutifully airing the aggrievements of the unaggrieved.
Later in the week, for participating in Congress's show with an obligingly egregious performance, one university president was sacrificed on the altar of conventional taste by being forced to resign (cancelled) from the pressure exerted on her for opting to defend free speech at her campus rather than affirming at a MAGA Congresswoman's request (posed á la "Do you still beat your wife?") that uttering a phrase-- "From the river to the sea"-- that could be disingenuously misinterpreted to be advocating for genocide of Jewish Israelis is bad. In the middle of all this, 95 House democrats helped the Republicans pass their Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism law. All of which is designed to stifle speech on American university campuses and elsewhere against Israel's genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
Meanwhile in Gaza...
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