60 Minutes Television Program

CNN's Anderson Cooper will contribute five stories a year to "60 Minutes" on CBS in an arrangement that also allows his own channel to rebroadcast those reports, both networks said Monday. Cooper, 38, fills a part-time slot previously taken by CNN's Christiane Amanpour and, along with Katie Couric's arrival at CBS this fall, gives a shot of new blood to TV's long-running and still top-rated newsmagazine. CNN wanted more than just exposure for its best-known personality.

Mike Wallace sure doesn't act like someone on the cusp of retirement. The veteran CBS broadcaster, who turns 88 on Tuesday, officially becomes "correspondent emeritus" at the end of this month, but when a visitor stopped by on a recent afternoon, he said he has no plans to pack up the memorabilia and Emmy Awards that line the walls of his "60 Minutes" office.

"Mind if I smoke?" Morley Safer asks as he gets up to close his office door at "60 Minutes." Not at all. It's a rhetorical question anyway, with his cigarette already halfway done. Besides, it feels appropriately old school, given Safer's link to the days when legends -- as well as smoke -- filled the hallways of CBS News. Mike Wallace's imminent retirement as a regular "60 Minutes" contributor will leave Safer, who joined the broadcast in 1970, as its senior correspondent.

Veteran CBS newsman Mike Wallace said Tuesday that he plans to make this his last season on "60 Minutes," but is stopping short of complete retirement as he wraps up 38 years on the venerable Sunday-night newscast. "I've often replied, when asked, 'I'll retire when my toes turn up,' " Wallace said in a phone interview, reading from a statement he had just written and relayed to CBS News executives.

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather returns to the airwaves this Sunday, when "60 Minutes" is scheduled to air his first piece for the program since he left the evening news in March. The segment is a profile on CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer. Rather, who delivered a controversial report in September 2004 about President Bush's National Guard service on the now-defunct "60 Minutes Wednesday," remained a correspondent on that program until it was canceled in May.

CBS' "60 Minutes" has sold all of its advertising time on Sunday's show to Philips, which the network said would allow the newsmagazine's stories to run longer. The electronics company will use half of the show's normal commercial time. As a result, the first two stories of the week will run uninterrupted. It's the first time this has happened since the newsmagazine began in 1968, and executive producer Jeff Fager said he hoped it would become more common.

The first few minutes of this Sunday's season premiere of "60 Minutes" offer a glimpse of some of the underlying tensions at the venerable television newsmagazine. Along with longtime correspondents Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Lesley Stahl and Morley Safer, the opening segment will feature another face -- that of former CBS anchor Dan Rather, who joined the show after "60 Minutes Wednesday" was canceled this spring.

Richard Scrushy once sat down to talk with "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace about allegations that Scrushy started a huge fraud while chief executive of HealthSouth Corp. Now, Scrushy wants Wallace to do the talking. Set to go on trial this week in Birmingham, Ala., on a 58-count indictment, Scrushy has subpoenaed Wallace and a CBS producer as witnesses to discuss their "60 Minutes" segment about the HealthSouth debacle, according to court documents.

The embattled CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes Wednesday" is adding to its reporting roster, hiring Ed Gordon, known for landing high-profile interviews while an anchor at cable's BET channel, as a contributing correspondent. Gordon's interview with Jamie Foxx, star of the new Ray Charles movie, "Ray," will air Wednesday. The 44-year-old interviewer is best known for his exclusive talk with O.J.

Viacom co-president Leslie Moonves told an investors conference Tuesday that results of an independent investigation into what went wrong with its CBS News "60 Minutes" report "obviously ... should be done probably after the election is over so that it doesn't affect what's going on." Moonves, who is also the chairman of CBS, spoke in response to a question at a Goldman Sachs conference and prefaced his comments by saying CBS "is not sure exactly" when the investigation will conclude.