"I think for anyone who grew up in my generation of news producers, in the 1970s, two people were hewn into the side of Mount Rushmore - Roone Arledge [of ABC] and Don Hewitt," said Paul Gluck, a longtime Philadelphia television executive and now associate professor of broadcasting, telecommunications, and mass media at Temple University.
"He always had this vision to take traditional television storytelling to a higher and more intricate level," Gluck said.
And he did it not with fancy visuals but with "tight shots, faces, and facts," Gluck said. "He knew that if you could get the facts and the relevant faces and voices, you could tell a good story."
In a statement released yesterday, Leslie Moonves, president of CBS News Corp., said: "In the history of journalism, there have been few who were as creative, dynamic and versatile as Don Hewitt. . . . [He] quite literally invented so many of the vehicles by which we now communicate the news."
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Donald Shepard Hewitt was born Dec. 14, 1922, in New York City, the son of an advertising salesman for Hearst newspapers, and grew up in nearby New Rochelle. He entered New York University on a track scholarship in 1940 but dropped out after a year to take his first job as a $15-a-week copyboy for the old New York Herald Tribune.
When World War II began, he joined the Merchant Marine and was sent to London, where he wrote for Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper.
After the war, he sped through a succession of short-term wire-service and newspaper jobs. In 1948, he found his lifetime working home at CBS.
His rise was rapid. Within two years, he was producing and directing CBS's 15-minute nightly newscast, Douglas Edwards With the News. He produced the coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and the installation of Pope John XXIII in 1958.
