The Summer of Celebrity/News Death continues! Don Hewitt, the guy who created famous old-people program 60 Minutes, is dead at 86. He, like all people who died this summer and got obits in the NYT, is/was a legend. Legend of what, you ask? TeeVee! Before this guy, we hear, there was no such thing as the TeeVee News Magazine. We don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing — well, on second thought, it was probably a bad thing. The television news killed the important newspaper industry, remember? And now look where we are! [CBS News]

The chemistry just sort of shoots off the screen, doesn’t it? We have no idea which 60 Minutes correspondent this is supposed to be — Morley Safer? Andy Rooney? — but she is clearly not very happy about this interview. Shouldn’t Joe Biden get one of the young, wacky 60 Minutes reporters? A guy named “Steve” or something? [Daily IQ]

• IS OBAMA A MURDERER BECAUSE HE LAUGHED? We have resisted the temptation to write about this all day but did you know that Politico WON THE AFTERNOON yesterday? Totally ace! AND YET VERY SERIOUS: Obama’s “awkward laughter” on 60 Minutes last night “highlighted an issue [he] has faced dating back to the campaign, a sense that he sometimes is too ‘cool’ and detached to fully grasp the public anxiety over mounting job losses and economic worries.” Laughter = cool… jackpot much!? This probably is an issue “he has faced dating back to the campaign,” except not really. And more importantly, the campaign ended in November so please stop writing like you’re covering a campaign. [Gawker]

That CBS decided to call the DVD Obama: All Access makes it pretty clear that this collection is not intended as a political souvenir for the policy nerds — this is about celebrity. Barack and Michelle make very good celebrities, and the two years worth of 60 Minutes interviews included here are probably a large part of how a liberal young black guy won over America. MORE »

60 Minutes is a television show about evil pharmaceutical company executives and child molesters, starring Andy Rooney as a straight-talking curmudgeon who guiltily masturbates to old issues of Life Magazine. In this week’s installment, Steve Kroft interviewed a promising young movie star named Barack Obama about what it will be like playing the nation’s first black President. MORE »

Oooh Sarko get so mad sometimes! On last night’s 60 Minutes, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who George Bush likes or something, walked out of an interview with the charming Lesley Stahl after being asked about his split with wife Cécilia (it was taped a few weeks ago, before France announced their divorce). As the New York Times describes the scene, Sarkozy “was shown standing up muttering in French” before peacing.

60 Minutes [CBS]

Little Nicky Douglas over at the Huffington Post created the graphic you see above so that you don’t have to watch or read anything about President Bush’s interview on CBS last night. It’s the number of times he said the word “decision” in nine short minutes. Total Decision count: 24 decisions (including the two times he yelled it for some reason). MORE »

Nearly every sighting this week comes from the exact same place, several at the exact same time. Wonkette operatives didn’t even need to use their sharp eyes to spot these old men in a barrel. Apparently, Bistro Bis is the be-seen restaurant du jour. Or maybe it was all along — the closest we come to a power lunch is eating a burrito really fast. But John Kerry, John Bolton, Jon Tester , Jim Lehrer, and Steve Kroft have more discriminating palates. You get all of them, and one Senator too busy working on his abs to respect his elders, by indulging your Mecury-in-retrograde-moon-is-in-the-seventh-house fantasies on the other side of the worm hole.

MORE »

Another Wednesday, another installment of our very favorite regular blog feature, “What As Andy Thinking.” Here, courtesy CBS, the topics of some of Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes editorials in 2003: MORE »

We take back every single negative thing we have ever said about a) blogs b) CBS c) TV news d) humanity in general. Because of this new feature at the CBS “PublicEye” site. It is called “What Was Andy Thinking?” and it is a list of things talked about by Andy Rooney every week on 60 Minutes. Here is but a sampling: MORE »