"Ticking Clock" by Ira Rosen

The media training industry – the companies and consultants with train people to be interviewed – owes its creation to one man and one television program – Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes. Having been through media training many times, I learned what it was like to face the camera and a hostile interviewer. 

Except for a brief stint with ABC Primetime, Ira Rosen spent almost three decades working as a producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes. He worked on a host of famous stories. He worked closely with Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Diane Sawyer, Chris Wallace, and other famous correspondents. He worked with many of their famous subjects – politicians, movie stars, gangsters, authors, dictators, He also experienced the stories that got away.

 

Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes is Rosen’s memoir of those years with CBS and ABC. It makes for both surprising and not-so-surprising reading. Most of these news broadcasting legends are gone now, but they helped to shape the world we live in today. And Rosen’s story is as much as about the foibles and vanity of the big TV news names as it is about the stories they covered and won prizes for. 

 

Ira Rosen

We know everyone is flawed. We know ego can play a role in people’s lives and attitudes. But it’s still disappointing to read to what degree so many of these news people were motivated by ego and ambition, and how little “news” might play a role. And it has to do with money. For a long, long time, 60 Minutes was the major moneymaker for CBS. The correspondents often behaved like the celebrities they interviewed, and sometimes behaved like the more notorious. Rosen doesn’t seem at all surprised at the rise of the “me-too” charges that seemed to grow like topsy at top television networks – the conditions had been laid years before.

 

It’s Mike Wallace, the 60 Minutes star whom Rosen worked with the longest and the most closely, who comes in for particular focus. Wallace was not a pleasant man, either personally or professionally. He could behave brutally, even to his own children. As he aged, his behavior didn’t mellow; if anything, it became worse. He was finally pushed out the door after crossing the wrong boss and thinking he could get away with it.

 

The descriptions of the good, the bad, and the ugly are balanced by Rosen’s love of his work. And he received numerous Emmy Awards, DuPont Awards, Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and a Peabody for that work. Even before he was hired by 60 Minutes, he was writing award-winning stories about the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island for Rolling Stone. And he knew that to get the real story, he had to ignore the official press conferences and go hang out with the plant workers at the bar after shift-change. He co-authored The Warning: The Accident at Three Mile Island.

 

Ticking Clock is an important book for understanding American journalism from 1980 to 2015. It describes how major television news magazines functioned, and both the working and the dysfunction of the major people involved. It’s an important story, but a story tinged with sadness. And then you wonder if the stories themselves required these kinds of personalities to tell them.