CBS is reporting that “60 Minutes” creator and cornerstone of CBS News Don Hewitt has died after being diagnosed with a small, contained tumor earlier in the year. He was 86. The news comes one month and two days after Hewitt’s long-time colleague, Walter Cronkite, passed away at 92.
Hewitt spear-headed the most successful television news show of all time in “60 Minutes,” and has been portrayed in film by Grant Heslov (George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.”) and Philip Baker Hall (Michael Mann’s “The Insider.”) Hewitt came under fire, as dramatized by Mann’s film, when he caved into corporate interests by refusing to air a segment in which former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on malfeasance practices at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company. But that, however damaging, is certainly not his legacy.
Hewitt was one of the titans who ushered in an age of televised news content, but his passing, along with Cronkite’s, continues to sound the bell of a forgotten or, at least, diminished period of high respect for the profession.