The Language of 60 Minutes, by Jeff Fager

Every Sunday night, 60 Minutes reaches millions of American homes, retaining something most television news has long since abandoned: a voice that actually sounds like a person talking to another person.

That may sound like a small thing, but it isn’t.

The language of 60 Minutes is, in many ways, closer to the way everyday Americans speak than the polished delivery that characterizes most broadcast news. There is no official guidebook for the broadcast. The rules of the road have been passed down through just a handful of people over nearly 60 years, absorbed instead of taught, and refined through repetition and discussion.

Watch almost any other newscast, and you will notice something right away. Nearly everything is reported in the present tense. A story that broke three days ago is still described as if it is unfolding at this very moment. Anchors pivot from one update to the next, each one carrying the same manufactured urgency. It is almost always headlined as “breaking news” on almost every news program. The effect is numbing. When everything sounds urgent, nothing really is.

The reason for this has nothing to do with journalism. It has everything to do with the consultants.

For decades, news divisions across the country have paid handsomely for advice from consulting firms that study audience behavior, test viewer responses, and package their findings into directives that producers and anchors are expected to follow. One of the most long-lasting pieces of wisdom is that viewers stay engaged when they believe something is happening right now. As a result, the present tense becomes a kind of performance, a grammatical sleight of hand designed to simulate immediacy, whether or not it actually exists.

60 Minutes never listened to the consultants.

The broadcast was built on a different assumption entirely: that viewers are competent, that they can tell the difference between something real and something manufactured, and that the best way to hold their attention is to be genuinely interesting rather than artificially urgent. Don Hewitt, who created the broadcast in 1968, understood this and, in keeping with CBS traditions, believed that a story told well in plain, honest language would outlast any trick a consultant could devise. That instinct shaped everything, including the grammar.

I kept a board of taboo words in my office at 60 Minutes. The words that violated our standards were what we called “newspeak”, the language of reporters that you hear on a regular basis. An example is the word “clear” or “clearly”. Watch a news broadcast, and you will hear it said often, even though not much in this world is very clear, most of it is fuzzy. Another good example is the word “exclusive,” which you will notice never gets used on 60 Minutes, even though we have had more “exclusives” over the years than any other broadcast. It’s forbidden on our broadcast because it is overused on the airwaves to the point that it carries no meaning.

At 60 Minutes, correspondents and producers tell stories as any good writer would tell them, with a sense of when something happened, how long it lasted, and what it meant, adding context and perspective wherever possible. The past tense is not something to be avoided. It is a tool, and an honest one. If something happened last week, it happened last week. The audience does not need to be deceived into caring about it.

It is one of the reasons the broadcast has lasted this long. Audiences may not be able to say why 60 Minutes sounds different from everything else on their television. But they feel it. There is a quality of straight talk in the language, a refusal to oversell, that registers as trust. And trust, over 57 seasons, turns out to be the most dependable currency in television news.