NEWSWATCH by Thomas Griffith: Mike Wallace's Jugular Journalism

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The face is familiar: the sharp eyes, the alert and aggressive manner, the quick and probing questions—and sometimes the grin of disbelief crossing the face as a quarry makes an unconvincing reply. Mike Wallace, though not a newspaperman, is what most Americans probably think an investigative reporter looks like. Television's 60 Minutes, which he, Morley Safer and Dan Rather preside over, rarely makes headlines with its reporting, but it consistently hits the mark with tales of wrongdoing and with vivid, edgy interviewing.

Investigative reporting, at its infrequent best, is journalism's most exciting and salable commodity. But when there's no Watergate around to pursue, many reporters, with a lot of dubious huffing and puffing, in print and on the air, try desperately to make less sound like more. 60 Minutes, with its hard-driving style, sometimes falls into this trap too, but its average is high.

Outside of the nightly news, 60 Minutes is network television's single ongoing success in news programming. It draws large audiences while documentaries are dying of public inattention. The differences between 60 Minutes and your ordinary documentary are much on the mind of the program's executive producer, Don Hewitt, who for 15 years produced the CBS Evening News.

Documentaries average a dismal percentage of the audience: "Perhaps," says Hewitt, "it's even the same 15%—all documentary freaks." To give 60 Minutes a better rating, CBS programs it against two kiddie shows early Sunday evening. But there are other reasons for its healthy 39% audience share. Hewitt aspired to put on a "LIFE magazine of the air" and insisted on multisubject programs. He wanted the same team appearing regularly, and he wanted his men out reporting, not studiobound as anchormen or hosts. Wallace agrees: "I had no intention of becoming the Ed Sullivan of news shows." In the beginning, Wallace was paired with the wry and amiable Harry Reasoner, in black-hat-and-white-hat contrast. Safer succeeded Reasoner; Rather was added to ease the work pressure on the other two. With three tough questioners, the program now has a flintier tone.

Bogart Fashion. Mike Wallace honed his own tough style years ago on a show called Night Beat, where, with back to the camera and head wreathed in cigarette smoke, he grilled subjects in Humphrey Bogart fashion. A tense-springed man, he still questions intently, but not so relentlessly.

As show biz, 60 Minutes obviously works, but, it raises some journalistic questions about the reporter as actor. Wallace is good as both. His interviews with names in the news may be sharper but don't otherwise differ from most interviews. The Shah of Iran gets his oil philosophy across, even if he has to endure Wallace's questioning about torture by his secret police. And such interviews have fail-safes: they take an hour, and are edited down to perhaps 15 minutes on the air. After ten minutes, in the pause for reloading the camera, Wallace may say, "You're giving me involved answers. Let's start all over again." Or, "You're being less than interesting." All too often the subject too feels a need to be interesting—sometimes at his own cost.