Extra Credit: Mike Wallace is Here

Before watching the documentary “Mike Wallace is Here” directed by Avi Belkin, I had no idea who Mike Wallace was. He was a self-proclaimed journalist and news reporter, drawing a lot of criticism from other professionals in the field, and was widely known for his unconventional form of interviews. He dominated every interview he conducted, asking the difficult questions no else did. He was confident and nosy in finding out the truth and what really happens behind the scenes to the point where he offended some with his abrasive questions resulting in some lawsuits. However, regardless of how others viewed him, he is accredited for pioneering the huge change of news reporting into a mass media business.

            In the beginning of his career, Mike Wallace took on any job was able to in television because the industry was still in its experimental stages in the 1950s. After working as a pitchman for commercials, he got his own TV show, The Mike Wallace Interview, where he started to rack up an accolade of journalistic works. His show was a mix of news journalism and a television show. He soon entered CBS covering more “serious news” such as the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X to going to Vietnam to cover the Vietnam War. He worked hard and stood out among all the other veteran reporters on 60 Minutes, a television news magazine show hybrid. The show really took off when it was the only program that covered the Watergate scandal, transforming news media depicting reporters as heroes saving the news from “sweating villains”.

Mike Wallace was often accused of just being “an actor who asked questions—a puppet.” Despite all the defamation he faced, he still worked hard for the 35 years he worked in his career. Through the film, Avi Belkin wanted to show the edginess and cunningness of Wallace as a muckraker and a black hat reporter, stating, “He worked as hard as anybody did… he was always asking the first question as the hardest one.” The film was successful in proving that fear is the energy behind doing your best work through the dedication Wallace had for news reporting.