Watching David Martin of 60 Minutes run around an open field with a huge piece of plywood covering his body (followed by a mattress), yelling "It hurts but I have to keep going," while getting shot by a ray gun ("Engage!") amuses us and reminds us of Coney Island's "Shoot the Freak" game. Video after the jump.
Mike Wallace, the crazily well-preserved 89-year-old 60 Minutes correspondent had triple bypass surgery over the weekend and is recovering nicely, the NYPost says. Good to hear! Despite the relatively decent health possessed by the rest of 60 Minutes crew, their Achilles heel remains their collective ancientness. Being a television news reporter isn't exactly easy on the ticker-PBS talk show host Charlie Rose practically died last year, but he's got a new gig-as a '60 Minutes' correspondent. Just what they needed, another faultily-wired senior citizen!
Don't pretend the low ratings for Sunday's 60 Minutes segment about Facebook say anything meaningful. Tech blog Silicon Alley Insider concluded that the world at large doesn't care about Facebook, but that's an unfair assumption. The awkward interview with site founder Mark Zuckerberg and a description of a site mostly geared toward college students may not have been the best material for the show's aging audience, but how many of them were even tuned in after the preceding segment, which explored rape and genocide in the Congo? It feels good to draw an obvious conclusion — Surprise! Old people don't care about Facebook — and I can sympathize with anyone squeezing a blog post out of a fake analysis. But the exercise is utterly useless when there's a more obvious answer.
Is it advertising if no one pays for it? In its rush to criticize Facebook's Beacon in last night's segment on the hot social network, 60 Minutes forgot to ask that question. In dramatic tones, correspondent Lesley Stahl ominously noted how "advertisers pulled out" after controversy erupted over the feature, which reports on users' online activities, including purchases. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended it to Stahl as the future of advertising, a form of sponsorship less crass than banner ads. If it's the future of advertising, though, it's not a very lucrative one.
With his 27 percent stake in the company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is worth about $4 billion. (In an interview aired last night, 60 Minutes put the figure at $3 billion, but the venerable show is — how to put this delicately? — incorrect.) So what does a billion here, a billion there do for the 23-year old founder? Not much to improve his wardrobe, apparently. "You don't look like you're buying expensive clothes," interviewer Lesley Stahl tells him. Ouch. And it sounds like that paper wealth isn't doing much to improve Zuck's housing situation, either.
"Facebook headquarters in downtown Palo Alto looks like a dorm room," Lesley Stahl narrated during last night's 60 Minutes piece on the company. "Facebook employees," Stahl also tells us, "show up late, stay late, and party really late." At the end of the the montage, it cuts to a darkened room where an employee continues to grind out work on his laptop while several others sit scrunched shoulder to shoulder on a red couch. There's also a DJ in the room. "Get down!" the music exhorts, 'cause it's totally like party planet down in Palo Alto. Woo. Wake us when they start taking their clothes off or putting on Viking helmets.
"You seem to be replacing Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone is talking about," 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his interview last night. In response, Zuckerberg sniffs. Then there's a beat. He blinks. Then Zuckerberg asks: "Is that a question?" He looks off camera and chuckles. Here's to another 100 years of puff pieces turned sour by petulance.
Facebook is the new Google, but not in the way Mark Zuckerberg wished. The 23-year-old founder is facing the same press backlash as his predecessors at the search company. His recent 60 Minutes interview ignored several pressing questions, and most of the show's 12-minute segment (available on CBS News Video) simply explained Facebook for old people and rehashed the usual "baby CEO" profile. But in the clip below from the end of the segment, Lesley Stahl criticizes Zuckerberg for launching Beacon, Facebook's stalkery program that tracks what users do on outside web sites unless they notice and opt out.
No one expects the fannish inquisition. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can breathe easy; he has nothing to fear from 60 Minutes after all. From the looks of the teaser CBS News is running for his upcoming interview, the hardest question Zuckerberg got asked was if he got in trouble at Harvard for launching Facemash, a predecessor of Facebook built from photos he hacked out of school servers. The venerable news organization even got his net worth wrong — he owns 27 percent of Facebook, making him worth $4 billion on paper, not $3 billion. So much for factchecking. Here are the questions we wish CBS's Lesley Stahl had asked — but doubt she bothered:
If you missed 60 Minutes's fawning profile of Will Smith last night—"This charming kid's just charmed!" seemed to be the main thrust of Steve Kroft's piece—we've included an outtake, in which the I Am Legend star describes how early on in his career, he and his manager looked at the top ten grossing films of all times, found some common themes (creatures, special effects, and love stories), then used those findings to map out a blueprint with which to conquer Hollywood.
Facebook has bigger problems than the possibility of an FTC inquiry. 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl recently visited the company's Palo Alto offices, says Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. According to Swisher, Stahl interviewed CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Kelly, the network's chief privacy officer. Which can only mean one thing: A major exposé on Facebook coming soon on the hard-hitting CBS news show. Don't think it's serious?
We've been checking out Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz's new book, "Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War," an advance excerpt of which was posted Sunday with great hubbub on Drudge. That excerpt recounts a discussion between Dan Rather and '60 Minutes' executive producer Josh Howard that took place on the eve of the airing of the controversial piece that would end Rather's career at the network. Kurtz's story was treated as big news—but the substance, and some of the language as well, was no different from New York Press editor-in-chief David Blum's 2004 book, "Tick... Tick... Tick..: The Long Life and Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes."
Hot hot hot profile of IAC head Barry Diller on "60 Minutes" last night. While the luscious boys of his subsidiary College Humor were, sadly, granted no screen time, Barry's wife, the luscious-in-her-own-way Diane Von Furstenberg was all over the place. Here she explains the touching marital bond that she shares with Diller.
Get your TiVos good and ready for this Sunday. Former Renee Zellweger consort Kenny Chesney sits down on "60 Minutes" and talks about all those nasty rumors that he might, you know, like sticking his junk in dudes.
Noted without comment.
If you're of a certain age, you'll remember Sunday nights as the disappointing crescendo of the weekend, made only slightly tolerable by the late football game segueing into 60 Minutes. And among that program's roster of luminaries, no one exuded more cool, joy, and intensity than Ed Bradley, who passed yesterday. Younger readers probably know him only as the old guy with the earring, but Bradley, who was a sprightly (for that program) 65, was indeed a pioneer, one of the first African-American broadcasters on network television. The papers are suitably respectful, although they seem a little caught off guard. The Times relies on extensive quotes from Bradley pal Jimmy Buffett; the Post has a Linda Stasi rush job, and the News offers up a fairly decent explanation of his appeal. There's a nice collection of clips over at Poynter. Fishbowl NY stirs up a bit of controversy, as "white semi-professional journalist" Dylan Stableford labels Bradley a "pimp" for dressing like everyone else did in the seventies. We'll give the last word to Gawker commenter Bob Loblaw, who expresses a sentiment fairly close to our own: "I've gotten good at pretending not to notice celebrities, but the night I waited for an elevator next to Ed Bradley, I was like a schoolgirl. The guy was a legend."
CBS is reporting that 60 Minutes legend Ed Bradley has passed away after a struggle with leukemia. Our thoughts go out to his family. More, obviously, to come.
• Networks sue FCC to make it stand up to Parents Television Council right-wing nutjobs. One can dream. [WSJ]
• Joanne Lipman wants to steal James Stewart from The New Yorker for her new Conde biz mag — which nearly has a name. [NYP]
• More books were sold in 2005 than 2004. A sales uptick for a print medium? How unusual. [NYT]
• Former Conde editorial director James Truman has a prototype for his new Culture & Travel, which is not — not at all, he says — the art mag Si wouldn't let him do. [NYP]
• Mike Wallace once tried to kill himself. [NYDN]
• Hachette to launch Shock mag next week. It's "Life magazine for the new millennium," says founder Mike Hammer, formerly of Maxim and Stuff. We suppose this means its gross pictures — such as one of a rotting human head in the first issue — are shot by Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt. [WSJ]
• In his forthcoming bio, Ed Kosner is not very nice to Mort Zuckerman. We're just shocked. [WWD]
• Jack Shafer, de facto Times ombudsman, doesn't care for Howell Raines' new memoir. [Slate]
• NYTer Sharon LaFraniere wins $25K Michael Kelly Award. [Kelly Award]
