Today in History—September 24: When 60 Minutes Started the Clock Ticking

On a Tuesday night (yes, that’s right) at 10 pm (again, really) 58 years ago, television was forever changed.

As viewers tuned in for the first episode of 60 Minutes, they saw correspondents Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace sitting on a simple set, telling people what they could expect: “A kind of a magazine for television,” Reasoner explained.

Reasoner went on to describe what he called “a new approach.” Ever the skeptic, Wallace seemed to question the entire enterprise, ending his comments with “We’ll see.”

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The father of 60 Minutes was executive producer Don Hewitt, who wanted to bring information programming to a broader audience, saying his goal was to create a show that “packaged reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction.”

The result of Hewitt’s experiment is one of the most significant and successful news programs in television history.

But much of what we associate with the program today wasn’t there then. Most notably, the ubiquitous ticking stopwatch didn’t become a fixture until several episodes into the 1968 season. And its Sunday night time slot didn’t come until 1975; since then it has been its own kind of must-see TV, doing investigations that set the news agenda and garnering interviews that made news themselves, including:

• Coretta Scott King and her children in December 1968
• Bill and Hillary Clinton talking about his infidelity in 1992
• Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in a jailhouse interview in 2000 before his execution
• Pope Francis in 2024

The 59th season of 60 Minutes began on September 13 without some of the familiar correspondents after a management shakeup. Fired correspondent Scott Pelley captured the essence of what has made the program so enduring when he said, “60 Minutes is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.”