Tag: Mike Wallace

"The Iranians just recently sponsored an attack that was almost successful in killing an American. . . We can do better."

CBS News icon Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" fame, the tough interviewer who may not have invented confrontational journalism but certainly perfected it, died...

Over the years, two Jewish journalists - Thomas Friedman and Mike Wallace - have been the subject of particularly intense vituperation in the letters and e-mails received by the Monitor, and both gentlemen have been scrutinized here on several occasions. One of the most popular columns, in terms of reader response, was a July 2002 piece on Wallace - actually, it was part of a series on Wallace the Monitor ran that summer - which looked at the possible genesis of his troubling attitude toward Israel.

This week the Monitor concludes its extended look at the anti-Israel proclivities of "60 Minutes" stalwart Mike Wallace. As we've noted in our earlier installments, Wallace has always displayed a palpable ambivalence - some would say that's too charitable a word - when dealing with Jewish issues, never more so than when he downplayed the plight of Soviet Jewry in the 1980's and Syrian Jewry in the 1970's.

"You and your friends won't like what you'll see on my program in a couple of weeks," Mike Wallace told an acquaintance in Jerusalem in November 1990, referring to a forthcoming "60 Minutes" report on the Temple Mount riot staged by Palestinians earlier that fall.

Readers will recall that a few months back the Monitor had words of uncharacteristic praise for Mike Wallace, who had just conducted an interview with Yasir Arafat that was far more skeptical than the fawning media treatment usually accorded the Palestinian leader.

Surely any but the most obtuse regular visitors to this space will understand just how painful it is for the Monitor to extend even the slightest praise to "60 Minutes" hatchet man Mike Wallace.