shemp
a flimsy character...perfidious and despised
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CBS News veteran Mike Wallace dead at age 93
- Thread starter shemp
- Start date
NewtonTrino
Illuminator
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2007
- Messages
- 4,585
I always enjoyed watching Mike do his thing.
applecorped
Banned
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2008
- Messages
- 20,145
Horrible news reporter. Great painter though.
Brown
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2001
- Messages
- 12,984
Mad Magazine referred to Mike Wallace as "Mike Malice." I liked that name, so that is what I've called him for the past several years.
As a game show host, he was decent. As an announcer he was superb at modulating his voice.
As a newsman ... well, this is where I have a few complaints with him. Like all modern-day talking heads, Mike was largely dependent on his producers and writers to dig up the stories and get them ready for him to report. Sometimes he did the heavy lifiting himself, and sometimes he left it to others. And sometimes the others led him astray. As an example: why do some people to this day think that sharks don't get cancer and that shark cartilege has magical anti-cancer power? You can thank Mike for perpetuating that brand of nonsense.
The problems at "60 Minutes" were systemic: I found it stunning how much stuff they got WRONG on the hard news and exposes. In university forensics, I found "60 Minutes" worthless as a source, because its sensationalist reports turned out not to be quite true. In one case that still stick in my craw, a report about fire protection was stunningly inaccurate. But hey, they were the Number One show on television! They must be truthful, right??
Mike was fond of what lawyers call "the leading question." No, he wouldn't let the interviewee tell his story, he would tell the witness things and ask the witness to agree with him. Not only could he (and did he) cue the witness overtly, he put together some inflamatory sound bites that way. For a hostile interviewee, he could bluff the guy into thinking that he had more than he did, and that would make the interviewee wriggle with discomfort.
As a sidelight, my sister draw the anger of Morely Safer himself a few years ago when she criticized him for trumping up a story and getting his facts mixed up. She was a real journalist, the beat reporter who knew the issues and the principals, and she knew Morley's story was crap. When her newspapaper approved an editorial calling Morley on his BS, he blew up. But the fact remains, Morely got it WRONG and she called him on it, and he didn't have the integrity to admit he'd got it wrong.
After that, I refused to watch "60 Minutes."
By that time, the grand old days of the Mike Malice were on the wane anyway. His appeal was to get some no-gooder in front of a camera and press him with leading questions to make him squirm. Audiences loved this, but the no-gooders eventually got wise and decided not to squirm for him anymore.
This is not to say all of Mike's work was bad. His human interest stories and newsmaker interviews were usually okay. But the nasty squirm-ridden interviews that were his trademark ... there was a fair amount of entertainment in them, but damn little in the way of actual news.
As a game show host, he was decent. As an announcer he was superb at modulating his voice.
As a newsman ... well, this is where I have a few complaints with him. Like all modern-day talking heads, Mike was largely dependent on his producers and writers to dig up the stories and get them ready for him to report. Sometimes he did the heavy lifiting himself, and sometimes he left it to others. And sometimes the others led him astray. As an example: why do some people to this day think that sharks don't get cancer and that shark cartilege has magical anti-cancer power? You can thank Mike for perpetuating that brand of nonsense.
The problems at "60 Minutes" were systemic: I found it stunning how much stuff they got WRONG on the hard news and exposes. In university forensics, I found "60 Minutes" worthless as a source, because its sensationalist reports turned out not to be quite true. In one case that still stick in my craw, a report about fire protection was stunningly inaccurate. But hey, they were the Number One show on television! They must be truthful, right??
Mike was fond of what lawyers call "the leading question." No, he wouldn't let the interviewee tell his story, he would tell the witness things and ask the witness to agree with him. Not only could he (and did he) cue the witness overtly, he put together some inflamatory sound bites that way. For a hostile interviewee, he could bluff the guy into thinking that he had more than he did, and that would make the interviewee wriggle with discomfort.
As a sidelight, my sister draw the anger of Morely Safer himself a few years ago when she criticized him for trumping up a story and getting his facts mixed up. She was a real journalist, the beat reporter who knew the issues and the principals, and she knew Morley's story was crap. When her newspapaper approved an editorial calling Morley on his BS, he blew up. But the fact remains, Morely got it WRONG and she called him on it, and he didn't have the integrity to admit he'd got it wrong.
After that, I refused to watch "60 Minutes."
By that time, the grand old days of the Mike Malice were on the wane anyway. His appeal was to get some no-gooder in front of a camera and press him with leading questions to make him squirm. Audiences loved this, but the no-gooders eventually got wise and decided not to squirm for him anymore.
This is not to say all of Mike's work was bad. His human interest stories and newsmaker interviews were usually okay. But the nasty squirm-ridden interviews that were his trademark ... there was a fair amount of entertainment in them, but damn little in the way of actual news.