While working for more than four decades on the celebrated CBS news magazine programme 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace was able to interrogate some of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He established a reputation as a journalist determined to hold the powerful to account, yet he was also a showman and his on-screen persona masked tragedy and torment in his private life. Avi Belkin’s appropriately unflinching portrait of Wallace charts the evolution of broadcast journalism and reminds us that vitality, nobility and integrity exist in American news media at a time when the worth of such values is increasingly under vexed scrutiny. MH

Second Chance: Mon, 11th Nov 2019