WASHINGTON — Morley Safer, who retired from “60 Minutes” last Sunday after 46 years, has died, CBS News reports. He was 84.
CBS News says that he watched the May 15 special edition of the show from his home, and that he had been in declining health when he announced his retirement.
“Morley was one of the most important journalists in any medium, ever,” CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves said. “He broke ground in war reporting and made a name that will forever be synonymous with 60 Minutes. He was also a gentleman, a scholar, a great raconteur – all of those things and much more to generations of colleagues, his legion of friends, and his family, to whom all of us at CBS offer our sincerest condolences over the loss of one of CBS’ and journalism’s greatest treasures.”
Safer replaced Harry Reasoner on “60 Minutes” in 1970, CBS News says. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent, and was the first U.S. network newsman to film a report inside Communist China.
His report about the U.S. Marines burning of huts in the Vietnamese hamlet of Cam Ne in August 1965 was cited by New York University as one of the best pieces of American journalism in the 20th century. “Some believe this report freed other journalists to stop censoring themselves and tell the raw truth about war,” CBS News says.
[related_gallery align=”right”] But it was on “60 Minutes” that he made his greatest impact. CBS cited some of his best reports as a 1971 investigation of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that precipitated U.S. involvement in Vietnam; a frank interview with first Lady Betty Ford in 1975 about teenage sex; a story that resulted in the freeing of an inmate from a life sentence in 1983, and two stories about Chicago teacher Marva Collins, in 1979 and a follow-up with her students in 1996.
Perhaps the distinction most indicative of Safer’s remarkable impact: He won the Paul White Award from the Radio and Television News Directors Association generally a lifetime-achievement award, in 1966. He was 35.
He told The Associated Press that despite the fact that he worked in the visual medium of television, he considered the spoken word the most important element: “What you’re aiming at,” he said, “are people’s ears rather than their eyes.”