Safer was a Canadian and American reporter and correspondent for CBS News.
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In 1970, Safer joined “60 Minutes”, then just two years old and not yet the national institution it would become.
This Oct. 6, 2008 photo released by CBS shows “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer during the program’s 40th anniversary celebration in NY. He was the longest-serving correspondent on the news magazine show. “We will miss him very much”, said Jeff Fager, the executive producer of 60 Minutes and Safer’s close friend and one-time 60 Minutes producer.
Safer was equally at home reporting on social injustices, abstract art and war-time atrocities.
Safer was also instrumental in helping to free Lenell Geter.
Safer’s retirement was timed due to health issues. (1993), which enraged the contemporary art world in questioning why vacuum cleaners, urinals and other household items were being sold as high-priced art; and a hard-hitting 2011 interviewwhere he asked Ruth Madoff what she knew about her husband Bernard’s Ponzi scheme. He almost ran the table – but not quite – when he took on Jackie Gleason at billiards during an interview.
Safer retired last week after more than half a century at CBS.
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“The Cam Ne story was broadcast over and over again in the United States and overseas”. “From his work during the War in Vietnam to his completely unique and evocative pieces for 60 Minutes, he set the standard for what we all want to be as journalists”. That consisted of Harry Reasoner, Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley and producer Don Hewitt. It was seized upon by Hanoi as a propaganda tool and by scoundrels of the left and right, in the Pentagon and on campuses”, Safer wrote in his 1990 memoir, “Flashbacks: “On Returning to Vietnam”. That honor belonged to his wife of 48 years, Jane Fearer.
