Although there are a million knock-offs and wannabes, 60 Minutes is still the best magazine show alive. I’ll admit I don’t clear my calendar like I once did, to make sure that I catch it, but I watched it last night and it’s still just as smart and fresh as it always was.
I used to watch this show every Sunday night. Having studied journalism, I’m always interested in how a reporter chooses to put a story together. Do you start in the middle? Do you bury the lead, but focus on it at the conclusion? Do you go traditional and begin at, well the beginning? 60 Minutes has always had the knack for choosing interesting topics and covering them in a way that allows you to learn, while all at the same time, sort of challenging you, in a provocative way. My parents always watched this show. But my enduring memory of it is that during football season, it was always delayed and that was really upsetting to me. When I would nag my avid football watching father to tell me how much time was left in the game, he would tell me there was just two minutes. Of course, he didn’t tell me that the two minutes left could and would likely be more like 20 minutes with all the stupid time outs, so I would sit and wait, wondering if my internal clock was off, or my dad was fucking with me. This is one of the possible roots to my intense dislike of football. When I was young, we had only one tv and on Sundays, it was all football, all the time. I remember the game back in 1968, when the Oakland Raiders defeated the New York Jets. My dad was a Jets fan and they were winning with one minute to go, when CBS ended their coverage of the game to air the film Heidi. The Jets hadn’t won, but I had! It was totally awesome. My dad totally flipped when he found out the Raiders scored two touchdowns in the last 60 seconds of the game.
Anyway, there are still great reporters on 60 minutes, but not like Harry Reasoner, Mike Wallace and Morley Safer. I can still conjure up each of their voices perfectly. They were a familiar and soothing part of my childhood.
Last night there was an intensely sad story about a North Korean political prison called Camp 14. By all accounts it’s like a concentration camp for those who have committed political crimes. The person accused of the crime isn’t just sent there, their whole family is whisked away to this horrible place where the treatment is inhumane, the days are filled with hard labor, and there is little to eat. The interview was with a boy named Shin Dong-hyuk who was actually born in Camp 14, but escaped at 23. He didn’t know anything about the bigger world. When asked if he knew about America or whether the world was round or flat, he said, he was unaware of either. He believed the camp was what life was. When Anderson Cooper asked him if he knew what love was in the first 23 years of his life, he answered he still didn’t know what it was. He was told what to do every moment of the day and he was hungry for the entire 23 years he was imprisoned. He talks a lot about this hunger and that it was the focus of him wanting to escape when he met a new prisoner who had lived in the outside world. This is when he began to think of a finding a way to leave. What drove him to find a way out? His dream of eating chicken and pork, of no longer being hungry. While this sounds somewhat comical, delivered by a boy void of any emotion, it was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. If you need some gratitude today, you should watch this story. It rocked my core.
And that’s what 60 Minutes has always done. Moved me, informed me, challenged me. I’m grateful for anything that does that.
*the gratitude-a-thon 
Over the last year I became intrigued by North Korea (possibly because I read MBA applications from South Koreans who reference reunification)…two great reads that I would suggest for your copious free time – The Orphan Master’s Son – A Novel, by Adam Johnson and Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. Very insightful and thought provoking. I’ll see if I can find the 60 minutes piece. Love that show but don’t watch much tv.