Mike Wallace Asks [antikvár]

It was eleven o'clock at night, October 9, 1956, when Mike Wallace looked into a television camera and said, "The name of the program is 'Night Beat,' and here's what it is all about. It's about people—people we think you will be curious about because they are news and because they make news. Even if 'Night Beat' must occasionally step on somé toes, we will try to get you stories of success and sorrow, trial and error, hope, folly and frustration. We will expose gripes, study conflicts and hear opinions." Since this declaration, Mike Wallace and his producer and partner, Ted Yates, Jr., have turnéd the close-up camera on hun-dreds of people—first on "Night Beat," a local New York program, and later on "The Mike Wallace Interview," on the ABC television network. The result has been exciting and controversial. The interviews have unquestionably pushed back the frontier of talk on television. Wallace has dug into the question of civil rights, censorship, poli-tics, religion, and social morality. His interviews have won him three awards from the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences, a Róbert E. Sherwood Memóriái Award for the program's contribution to "the understanding of freedom and justice," as well as, in somé quarters, the label of "inquisitor" and "sensationalist." Mike Wallace defines and defends his job by reciting this obser-vation from a legal opinion of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: "The function of free speech under our system of govern-ment is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea." The following excerpts were taken from unrehearsed Mike Wallace TV and newspaper interviews. Besides revealing with clarity the unvarnished personality of the subject himself, many of the interviews have had profound unsettling elfects, have indeed stirred people to anger, and have, undoubtedly, invited dispute. "IT'S ABOUT PEOPLE" THE EDITORS