"Sixty Minutes" shows once again why it's the best biz journalism on TV

Earlier this week, the CBS show “60 Minutes” received nine nominations for this year’s annual Emmy Awards for Business & Financial Reporting. That’s the most nominations for any show on television, and more than entire business news networks such as CNBC. It’s also more than 25 percent of the 33 nominations.

Among the “60 Minutes” segments nominated was a great piece on the France family that runs NASCAR, a segment on General Motors, and others that looked at workplace issues.

To some, that may seem surprising. “Sixty Minutes” has this public perception of going after politicians and criminals and features of famous people such as the one this past Sunday on Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis. But it has a nearly 40-year tradition of producing some of the top business stories on TV, and Tuesday’s nomination count verified that. That’s why I think it’s the best at business journalism on TV. It’s consistently covered business news more aggressively than anyone else on TV, without fear of who’s going to get upset.

The show, which aired for the first time in September 1968, began by covering many business stories and issues that delved deeply into businesses. In short time, companies and executives began to fear receiving a call from “60 Minutes.� Many began denying requests to be interviewed by the show.

Executive Producer Don Hewitt reacted by stating, “Business wants reported only what fits the carefully tailored profile that Madison Avenue and public relations people have put together.�

Not all of the stories about business and businessmen were critical. In the first year, the show profiled billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt in a laudatory, rags-to-riches profile. More recently, Leslie Stahl reported a positive piece on former GE CEO Jack Welch for the program.

But many of the shows broke new ground in business journalism. In 1978, “60 Minutes� cooperated with the Chicago Sun-Times to set up a bar to catch government officials taking bribes. The same year, the show ran a story on the Pinto that questioned the safety of the Ford Motor Co. vehicle. The Pinto story ran despite Ford’s being a sponsor of the show, and it continued the tradition of the business press aggressively covering the auto industry. Later that year, the show also ran an expose on service stations making unneeded repairs. In 1979, the show ran a segment on a California chemical plant that was contaminating water in the area.

One of the show’s most famous pieces of business journalism occurred in 1979, when it ran a 16-minute segment on the construction of a nuclear power plant by Illinois Power. The Sunday night show accused the company of millions of dollars in excessive costs that would likely be passed on to consumers. The next day, the company’s stock fell in the busiest trading day of its history.

In 1980, a segment discussed the rising number of workers who were paid in cash never reported to the Internal Revenue Service, while another piece delved into the silver business and how Nelson Bunker Hunt was cornering the market. The same year, it profiled the head of the Federal Trade Commission after businesses complained it was being heavy-handed with its regulations. In 1989, the show ran an expose on Freedom Financial Corp., a time-share resort company that offered outlandish gifts such as cars and money to get people to visit its locations. The next year, it documented how used car dealers were rolling back the odometers on vehicles to increase their price.

“Sixty Minutes� contributed to business journalism by showing that investigative reporting about business and companies could be done in any medium. And it awoke many in the print media, which had primarily been silent in criticizing industry in the 1950s and 1960s, that there were important stories to be covered that were being ignored.

In addition, the show spawned a number of similar shows on television that also began to aggressively pursue business stories as part of their regular segments. Among them were ABC’s “20/20� and NBC’s “Prime Time Live.� Many of these shows copied “60 Minutes.�