news-shows

"Whatever the formula, 60 Minutes is a relatively low-cost, spectacularly revenue-producing success. In in 1991-1992 season, the one-hour show was listed as the one that was the least expensive to produce."

"60 Minutes has been one of the premier programs produced by CBS, which counts the profits from this show to be significantly in excess of $1 billion."

"In 1991, 60 Minutes ran a damning profile of charismatic EST founder Werner Erhard (born Jack Rosenberg). A onetime student of Scientology, Erhard was accused of sexual and physical abuse by his family, though some of those claims were later recanted. That same year, Erhard sold out to Landmark Education, which continues to attract millions of followers from all over the world. Landmark is now run by Erhard's brother and sister."

"One of the best things about being at 60 Minutes is the amount of time devoted to a single story."

"By the time of the '60 Minutes' broadcast, Werner Erhard had already decided that the United States no longer provided a very hospitable place in which to live."

"When Les and I spoke, he looked me in the eye and convinced me that he was sincere in what he was saying about wanting me to stay with CBS for many years on 60 Minutes. I trusted him as a man of his word."

"After an hour of 60 Minutes, Erhard was as dead as Audi. One might have thought that Werner Erhard, the company, was beyond saving. Not true. The name was destroyed, but not the company."

"60 Minutes is still the most successful news program in television history, continuing to earn high ratings, journalistic awards, and an enormous fortune for CBS."

"The media today are controlled by the big corporations. It's all about ratings and money. Believe it or not, I think the downfall of our press today was the show 60 Minutes. Up until it came along, news was expected to lose money, in order to bring the people fair reporting and the truth. But when 60 Minutes became the top-rated program on television, the light went on. The corporate honchos said, "Wait a minute, you mean if we entertain with the news, we can make money?" It was the realization that, if packaged the correct way, the news could make you big bucks. No longer was it a matter of scooping somebody else on a story, but whether 20/20's ratings this week were better than Dateline's. I'm not knocking 60 Minutes. It was tremendously well done and hugely successful, but in the long run it could end up being a detriment to society."

"I mean to work for 60 Minutes, and be able to go any place in the world, do any story, have enough time on the air, et cetera, there is simply no job in journalism like it. At the beginning, it was a dream. Even now, at the age of 84, I work with people who are half my age or less, and it is the draw of the story. If there is a good story going, why not be there?"

"All across America, thousands of est graduates, Forum participants, Erhard employees, and other faithful acolytes — not to mention countless others who may have remembered only vaguely the man with the strange-sounding name of Werner Erhard - — watched as '60 Minutes' correspondent Ed Bradley related a dark story of Erhard's past."

"The “60 Minutes” segment was filled with so many factual discrepancies that the transcript was made unavailable with this disclaimer: “This segment has been deleted at the request of CBS News for legal or copyright reasons.”"

"There is only one appropriate response to these allegations, to heal and restore my family. And that is what I will do. To respond to the accusations at this time, would only further publicly exploit my family, and there has already been enough of that."

"In a nutshell, Erhard's message was this: If you are in a rut, the problem isn't your parents, your boss or the system, it's you. Take responsibility, Erhard said, and you can transform your life overnight."

"Who was the role model, the living example of what the est Training could do? Who else but Werner Erhard, a man some of his employees say, thought of himself, as god."

"Werner Erhard, last sighted in Costa Rica, has dropped his megabucks libel suit against CBS' 60 Minutes, which did a number on him about a year ago. Nice guy that he is, he sent checks for $100 to each of the 20 defendants to cover the filing fee they had to pay to answer his charges of 'a conspiracy to defame and ruin me'."

"After an hour of 60 Minutes, Erhard was as dead as Audi. One might have thought that Werner Erhard, the company, was beyond saving. Not true. The name was destroyed, but not the company."

"Who was the role model, the living example of what the could do? Who else but Werner Erhard, a man some of his employees say, thought of himself, as god."

"I would never have believed that I, could be a person who would wind up in a cult...And yet, certainly mind control was involved. And if that's what cults do, and they set up a leader to be bigger than anybody else, a god-like figure, I would say yes, that was true in the organization."

"There is only one appropriate response to these allegations, to heal and restore my family. And that is what I will do. To respond to the accusations at this time, would only further publicly exploit my family, and there has already been enough of that."

"Mr. President, this is Ed Bradley in New York. There are many people who would question our system of criminal justice today in the United States--in fact, many people who have lost faith in our criminal justice system. With so many people languishing on death row today for so many years, how can you say with such assurance that justice will be certain, swift, and severe?"

"We still will have freedom of speech. We'll have freedom of association. We'll have freedom of movement. But we may have to have some discipline in doing it so we can go after people who want to destroy our very way of life."

"You know, we accepted a minor infringement on our freedom, I guess, when the airport metal detectors were put up, but they went a long way to stop airplane hijackings and the explosion of planes and the murdering of innocent people. We're going to have to be very, very tough and firm in dealing with this. We cannot allow our country to be subject to the kinds of things these poor people in Oklahoma City have been through in the last few days."

"This is a freedom-loving democracy because the rule of law has reigned for over 200 years now, not because vigilantes took the law into their own hands."

"I don't want to interfere with anybody's constitutional rights. But people do not have a right to violate the law and do not have a right to encourage people to kill law enforcement officials and do not have a right to take the position that if a law enforcement officer simply tries to see them about whether they've violated the law or not, they can blow him to kingdom come. That is wrong."

"We do have free speech in this country, and we have very broad free speech, and I support that."

"People should examine the consequences of what they say and the kind of emotions they are trying to inflame."

"Mr. President, Mike Wallace. Are we Americans going to have to give up some of our liberties in order better to combat terrorism, both from overseas and here?"

"I think what I'll miss the most is the work, the job, the contact with all kinds of people and all kinds of issues, the ability to make a difference, to solve problems, to open up opportunities for other people. There's almost no--not almost, I suppose there is no job like it in the world. It's been an unbelievable thrill and a profound honor, and I will miss it very much."

"The thing I love most is being President, doing the job every day. It just--to me, it's an almost indescribable honor. I would never grow tired of it, and I feel graced every day."

"On balance, I think the two-term tradition has served us well. I'm glad President Roosevelt served the third term, because of the war. But on balance, I think it's served us well. Now, you know, I'm young, and I'm strong, and I'm, as far I know, in good health. I love the job. And so if I could serve again, I probably would. But I think that's the reason we have this limit, so that people like me don't get to make that decision."

"I believed when I got here that there was a chance that we could have a very long period of economic growth. Now I couldn't have known, when we started and we started slashing the deficit and investing more in technology, that we would have the longest economic expansion in history that would even outstrip wartime when we had been fully mobilized."

"I would remind you that in the United States we had an increasing gap between the rich and the poor for about 20 years, as we moved into this new economic phase. The same thing happened when we changed from being an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. In the last 2 or 3 years, we started to see the gap close again. And the answer is not to run away from globalization. The answer is to make change our friend. The answer is to have broad access to information and information technology, to have broad-based systems of education and health care and family supports in every country, and to continue to try to shape the global economy."

"All over the world people are embracing democracy and market economics. But if you enjoy the level of military and economic strength we have and the level of political influence, people are going to resent you."

"I have done everything I could as President to try to organize the permanent Government, the people who will be here when I am gone, and the Congress to deal with the long-term threat of biological, chemical, and small scale nuclear war, as well as the increasing sophistication of traditional weapons."

"But yes, there will be problems. Yes, there could be terrible incidences. But I would say to the American people, they should, on balance, be hopeful."

"We've got plenty of talented people. We just need to be imagining the future, thinking about all the problems as well as all the opportunities, and then prepare. Society always has problems; there are always misfortunes. But basically, I believe the future is quite promising and far more exciting than any period in history. I wish I were going to live to be 150; I'd love to see what happens."

"I think the most important thing is for me to be a useful citizen of this country and of this world, because I've had opportunities here only my other living predecessors have had. And I think that for me to be able to continue the work I've done in racial and religious and ethnic reconciliation and trying to convince people that we can grow the global economy and still preserve the environment and trying to empower the poor and the dispossessed, in trying to spread the universal impact of education and use technology to benefit ordinary people, these kinds of things--I think I should continue to do this work and trying--I want to get young people into public service. I want them to believe this is noble and important work."

"Media has done a tremendous service to our nation by bringing awareness to the issue. Proactive online investigations are effective in identifying and ultimately catching child sexual predators, when conducted by proper law enforcement authorities"

"Our next guest is host of the funniest comedy on television. It's called To Catch a Predator. If you've never seen it, it's like Punk'd for pedophiles. It's a great show and you can watch it this Wednesday night on NBC. Please say hello to Chris Hansen."

"The issues "To Catch A Predator" raises are tied to larger journalistic questions too important to be ignored. It should be left to the law to decide how the men exposed on the program should be dealt with. But it is up to media to police its own behavior, even when the topic is distasteful and satisfying answers are not easy to come by."