Myron Leon "Mike" Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American journalist, game show host, actor and media personality. He interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his sixty-year career. He was one of the original correspondents for CBS' 60 Minutes which debuted in 1968. Wallace retired as a regular full-time correspondent in 2006, but still appeared occasionally on the series until 2008.

60 Minutes
His career as the lead reporter on 60 Minutes naturally led to some run-ins with the people interviewed. While interviewing Louis Farrakhan, Wallace alleged that Nigeria is the most corrupt country in the world. Farrakhan immediately shot back, declaring "Nigeria didn't bomb Hiroshima or slaughter millions of Indians!" "Can you think of a more corrupt country?" asked Wallace. "I am living in one," said Farrakhan. Wallace expressed regret in regard to the one big interview he was never able to secure: First Lady Pat Nixon. Wallace interviewed Gen. William Westmoreland for the CBS special The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, aired January 23, 1982. Westmoreland then sued Wallace and CBS for libel. The trial ended in February 1985 when the case was settled out of court just before it would have gone to the jury. Each side agreed to pay its own costs and attorney's fees and CBS issued a clarification of its intent with respect to the original story.

In 1981, Wallace was forced to apologize for a racial slur he had made about blacks and Hispanics. During a break while preparing a 60 Minutes report on a bank that had been accused of duping low-income Californians, Wallace was caught on tape joking that "You bet your ass  hard to read" if you're reading them over watermelon or tacos. Attention was re-drawn to that incident several years later when protests were raised against Wallace's being selected to give a university commencement address at the same ceremony during which Nelson Mandela was being awarded an honorary doctorate in absentia for his fight against racism. Wallace initially called the protestors' complaint "absolute foolishness." However, he subsequently again apologized for his earlier remark, and added that when he had been a student decades earlier on the same university campus, "though it had never really caused me any serious difficulty here ... I was keenly aware of being Jewish, and quick to detect slights, real or imagined.... We Jews felt a kind of kinship ," but "Lord knows, we weren't riding the same slave ship."