Mad as Hell: How 60 Minutes Took on the Powerful and Made Television History

"A revealing fly-on-the-wall account of how news is made." - Kirkus Reviews

For almost sixty years, every Sunday night at seven o'clock sharp, a simple ticking stopwatch made America stop what it was doing.

At its peak, 60 Minutes was the most powerful hour on television, drawing as many as fifty million viewers each week. Presidents watched. CEOs braced themselves. Ordinary citizens--wronged, ignored, or silenced--found a voice.

Today, amid upheaval at CBS News and renewed debate over press freedom, that voice faces an urgent test of its journalistic integrity.

In Mad as Hell, a producer from the program's golden years takes readers deep inside the broadcast that reshaped television journalism. Working alongside Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley, and executive producer Don Hewitt for over twenty years, Harry Moses reveals how a scrappy news experiment became a national institution--and how investigative journalism at its best could hold the powerful to account.

Timely and deeply informed, Mad as Hell is a reminder of why fearless journalism still matters, and what is at stake when the institutions built to defend the truth come under threat.

Harry Moses has made documentary films, television programs, and features including The Trial of Bernhard Goetz, Assault at West Point, and Who the %$#! is Jackson Pollock? At CBS News, he wrote, directed and produced almost one hundred stories for 60 Minutes. He has received Emmy, Peabody, and Directors Guild of America awards, as well as a Lifetime Achievement citation from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his work on 60 Minutes. He has taught journalism at NYU, Columbia and Quinnipiac University.