Morley Safer, celebrated correspondent who didn't care for celebrities, dies at 84

The correspondent had announced his retirement just a few days before his death

Morley Safer at his 60 Minutes home (CBS)

Morley Safer, a stalwart for six decades at CBS News - and for most of that time at its flagship current affairs programme 60 Minutes - has died just days after announcing his retirement.

As much a household name in America as anyone else in the news business, Mr Safer was 84 years old and had confirmed only last week that he was retiring from the news show that airs weekly on Sunday evenings and is consistently one of the highest-rated network programmes.

His sometimes lugubrious mien disguised a boots-and-pencil reporter’s instinct first honed in the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson demanded he be fired from the network in 1966 for “crapping on the American flag” with a dispatch showing US soldiers torching an enemy village.

Safer was not one to court celebrities (AP)

In all he was at 60 Minutes for no less than 46 years, working in the past with legendary colleagues who have also since passed away including Mike Wallace and Andy Rooney. (Mr Rooney died four weeks after announcing his retirement from the show in 2011.

The creator of the show, the late Don Hewitt, would often pay particular tribute to Mr Safer for a 1983 story that presented new evidence in a case of a man who who had been sentenced to life in prison in Texas for armed robbery that would eventually set him free.

“I really don’t think there’s anybody else in broadcast journalism with the high quality of work and his extraordinary range and collection of stories,” Jeffrey Fager, the executive producers at 60 Minutes, told The Daily Beast after Mr Safer’s retirement but before his passing.

“He really knows how to tell a story, and he has loved what he does, he’s made good money, and he’s never taken it for granted,” Mr Fager added. “It’s incredibly interesting to watch his stories. I’m sure he did a couple of clunkers. I just said that to him when I was with him. But I can say that almost all of them were gems. He’s such a brilliant writer.”

Born in Canada, Mr Safer joined CBS’s London bureau in 1964 and thereafter established the network’s Saigon operation. After the Vietnam war he returned to London to be bureau chief.

If hard news was his fuel, Mr Safer was suspicious of the rush to celebrity reporting. “I really don't care what movie stars have to say about life,” he once remarked. Still, on occasion he could be lured across the aisle, as when he completed a still fondly remembered profile of Dolly Parton, the actor and country star.

“If I could interview Dolly every week, I would,” Safer told the New York Post in 2009.