Morley Safer, “60 Minutes” news magazine correspondent for the last 46 years, has died.
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Longtime CBS newsman “60 Minutes” journalist Morley Safer died at age 84 after a period of declining health, CBS News reported Thursday. He filed his 919th and last report, about the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, in March. He last appeared on the weekly news show on Sunday night (15May16).
Although he interviewed many artists, actors and musicians, Safer never cared much for celebrities, saying, “I really don’t care what movie stars have to say about life”.
He also received the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac College, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards First Prize for Domestic Television, according to CBS.
Born in a working-class neighborhood of Toronto in 1931, Safer began his career as a print reporter for Canadian newspapers.
Safer won 12 Emmy awards, three Overseas Press Club awards, three Peabody awards and a George Polk career achievement award. Then, in 1955, he was offered a correspondent’s job in the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s London bureau, where he worked nine years before CBS News hired him for its London bureau. That report was widely seen as one of the first to turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. The reaction was profound; President Lyndon Johnson reportedly called the head of CBS and shouted: “You shat on the American flag”.
The late Don Hewitt, the creator of “60 Minutes”, often cited a Safer story as one of the show’s greatest moments.
“After four or five different wars, I grew tired of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it’s not that hard, really”, he said.
NBC News anchor Lester Holt tweeted, “Morley Safer was a master of his craft and set a high bar for all of us in broadcast journalism. 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”.
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Safer is survived by his wife, the former Jane Fearer, and his daughter Sarah Safer.
