BOB GARFIELD: First, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, then former Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke, and last week, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. If you've written a book that shakes up the Washington establishment, "60 Minutes", at least lately, is the place to be. [TAPE FROM "60 Minutes"]

MIKE WALLACE: Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn the president did not ask key cabinet members either.

BOB WOODWARD: The president, in making the decision to go to war, did not ask his Secretary of Defense for an overall recommendation, did not ask his Secretary of State Colin Powell for his recommendation.

BOB GARFIELD:This week, Daily Show host Jon Stewart called the program "the premier venue for taking a steamer on the Bush administration." What is it with this show? After four decades, creator Don Hewitt will step down at the end of this season, but Hewitt's winning formula will stay firmly in place. Joining us now is Richard Campbell, author of "60 Minutes" in the News: A Mythology for Middle America, which anatomized the secret of the show's success. Richard, welcome to OTM.

RICHARD CAMPBELL: Thank you very much. Good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Sketch for me, please, the media climate into which ""60 Minutes"" emerged 35 years ago.

RICHARD CAMPBELL: That was 1968, and I think that ""60 Minutes"," for me, was part of a movement that we usually associate with print, written material, the new journalism or the literary journalism. This was the adaptation of fictional storytelling devices to journalism, and it's probably better known in the work of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood or Tom Wolfe's Electric Koolaid Acid Test. But ""60 Minutes"" was a visual version of that --a TV version of that. And what Don Hewitt, the creator of ""60 Minutes"" and still its guiding light, tried to do was figure out a way for reporters to be stars in their stories, and probably more than anyone else, foregrounded the use of narrative structure in creating television journalism programming that's still probably the, the model today for all the shows.

BOB GARFIELD: Can you tell me how he applied the principles of storytelling to the news?

RICHARD CAMPBELL:Well, I think the dominant story form on "60 Minutes" is the detective story, and I think the idea is the championing of a heroic individual, usually the detective who figures out everything, and at the end of the story presents the denouement or the climax, and in the "60 Minutes" model, the reporters often behave as detectives, even down to a tradition of wearing trenchcoats. And this is a powerful narrative in our culture, particularly because of the celebration of individualism and the notion of the individual reporter or detective confronting evil and righting wrongs.

BOB GARFIELD:Okay, familiar narrative techniques, but for whatever reason, "60 Minutes" seems to be in a particularly fertile period. Is there a difference between how "60 Minutes" operates in a time of political conflict as opposed to just ordinary times?

RICHARD CAMPBELL: I wouldn't say it's flourishing. I mean its audience is half of what it used to be. It's still the biggest game in journalism. I mean any single episode of "60 Minutes" attracts a bigger journalism audience than any other journalism outlet in the United States, still today. We're talking between 15 and 20 million people. That many people don't read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal in a day, and certainly that many people aren't watching Peter Jennings in the evening or Tom Brokaw. I think it made its reputation during the Watergate era, interviewing all of the key players in Watergate. I think it made Bill Clinton's career in 1992, when he and Hillary went on and kind of explained Gennifer Flowers away, and "60 Minutes" kind of okayed him for, for the run.

BOB GARFIELD:There are certain "60 Minutes" characteristics in the way the camera is deployed, in the way edits are done. Can you describe some of them for us?

RICHARD CAMPBELL: Villains and victims on "60 Minutes" are usually shot in much tighter close-ups, often with the top of their head and the bottom of their chin cropped from the frame. And then there's a reaction shot from the reporters, and the reporters are usually shown with plenty of space over their heads. It's usually a medium shot or a middle shot, and they look much more in control of space than the interview subjects on the show. And that's a technique that they've used since the beginning that a certain-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BOB GARFIELD: --That has a certain demonizing quality as well, doesn't it? I'm, I'm thinking of Anthony Hopkins--

RICHARD CAMPBELL: --It does.

BOB GARFIELD:-- in Silence of the Lambs. Those type closeups are positive eerie. So is it fair to do that? Isn't it a sort of visual editorializing?

RICHARD CAMPBELL: "60 Minutes" has never claimed to be some kind of objective piece of journalism. They have a story to tell, and whenever you tell a story, you're going to have villains and victims, and what "60 Minutes" does in its narrative, it celebrates the individual and usually does demonize institutions, bureaucracies. There have been many times, particularly in the old days, where the Pentagon during the Reagan administration wouldn't talk to "60 Minutes", and they'd simply take an aerial photo of the Pentagon and, and that's how it was represented. Well, representing an institution by an aerial photo of a building is a very impersonal way to treat an institution, but it kind of fits the "60 Minutes" formula. And I would argue this is probably a major problem with journalism in general. They have great ways to tell stories about individuals, but they don't have narratives to tell stories about how institutions work or don't work. Journalism lacks those kinds of narratives, and I think it, it hurts us as a culture.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Richard, thank you very much.

RICHARD CAMPBELL: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD:Richard Campbell is the former director of the Journalism School at Middle Tennessee State University. He's on his way to a similar job at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, why the White House press is the last to know. Also, an epistolary compulsive, and what author Helen Fielding wrought.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.