Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press



CBS News on Sunday morning put in motion its plans to honor Mike Wallace, a pioneer of American broadcasting who died on Saturday night. He was 93.

The network said it would acknowledge Mr. Wallace’s death on “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, and then dedicate a special edition of the program to Mr. Wallace in one week, on April 15.

While a tribute to Mr. Wallace has been ready for some time now — he had been ill for several years — CBS executives saw no compelling reason to rush it onto television on Easter Sunday.

“We thought we’d better off doing it next week so we don’t have to rush it on this week,” said Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and the executive producer of “60 Minutes.”

The delay will give the network more time to promote the special and make final adjustments to it.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Fager said that all of the “60 Minutes” correspondents participated in the making of the hour-long tribute. Mr. Wallace did too, by consenting to interviews over the years. “Some of them in anticipation for the inevitable, so that we were well prepared for it,” Mr. Fager said.

As one of the original correspondents and hosts of “60 Minutes,” which was started in 1968, Mr. Wallace helped to establish the television newsmagazine format. “Without him and his iconic style, there probably wouldn’t be a ’60 Minutes,'” Mr. Fager said in a statement on Sunday morning.

CBS announced Mr. Wallace’s death on “CBS Sunday Morning,” then showed a prepared obituary on “Face the Nation,” its Sunday morning public affairs program. The host of “Face the Nation,” Bob Schieffer, said that Mr. Wallace was “one of the real pioneers in television journalism.”

There were no immediate announcements about funeral or memorial plans, but Mr. Fager said that CBS would likely hold a memorial service later in the spring.

On Sunday, colleagues and competitors alike remembered Mr. Wallace for inspiring a generation of journalists with confrontational interviews and creative television news story-telling.

“It is with tremendous sadness that we mark the passing of Mike Wallace,” Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS Corporation, said in a statement. “His extraordinary contribution as a broadcaster is immeasurable and he has been a force within the television industry throughout its existence. His loss will be felt by all of us at CBS.”

In an essay for CBS News, Morley Safer, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, recounted his colleague’s career thusly:

Wallace took to heart the old reporter’s pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He characterized himself as “nosy and insistent.” So insistent, there were very few 20th century icons who didn’t submit to a Mike Wallace interview. He lectured Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, on corruption. He lectured Yassir Arafat on violence. He asked the Ayatollah Khoumeini if he were crazy. He traveled with Martin Luther King (whom Wallace called his hero). He grappled with Louis Farrakhan. And he interviewed Malcolm X shortly before his assassination.

A former colleague, Dan Rather, released a statement that described Mr. Wallace as “the heart and soul of ’60 Minutes.'” Mr. Rather, now of the cable channel HDNet, was a part-time correspondent for “60 Minutes” for many years.

“He helped change American television news,” Mr. Rather said. “Among the ways that this change was for the better: TV news became more investigative, more aggressive and relevant.”

Mr. Fager said in his statement Sunday morning, “It almost didn’t matter what stories he was covering, you just wanted to hear what he would ask next.”

He added, “We loved him and we will miss him very much.”

Mr. Wallace entered semi-retirement in 2006, but returned to “60 Minutes” for interviews with Mitt Romney, Jack Kevorkian and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He last appeared on “60 Minutes” in January 2008, when he had an exclusive interview with Roger Clemens, a baseball legend who had been accused of steroid use.

Weeks after the interview was shown, Mr. Wallace underwent a triple bypass surgery. He was noticeably absent in January when CBS held a memorial service for another legendary “60 Minutes” figure, Andy Rooney, who died in November at age 92.

In a recent interview with Playboy magazine, Mr. Wallace’s son Chris, who is the anchor of “Fox News Sunday” on Fox, said that his father “is 93 and showing it for the first time.”

“He’s in a facility in Connecticut. Physically, he’s okay. Mentally, he’s not,” Chris Wallace said. “He still recognizes me and knows who I am, but he’s uneven. The interesting thing is, he never mentions ’60 Minutes.’ It’s as if it didn’t exist. It’s as if that part of his memory is completely gone. The only thing he really talks about is family — me, my kids, my grandkids, his great-grandchildren. There’s a lesson there. This is a man who had a fabulous career and for whom work always came first. Now he can’t even remember it.”

Competitors of CBS paused on Sunday morning to praise Mr. Wallace, who was well-known within the tight-knit television news industry.

“Mike’s tough questioning inspired generations of journalists,” the ABC News president Ben Sherwood said in a statement.

“His unique style compelled you to sit forward and take notice of everything he put on the air,” the NBC News president Steve Capus said.

“He will always be in the pantheon of greats in television and journalism,” the Fox News chairman Roger Ailes said in a telephone interview on Fox News.

Online, too, there were quick reactions to Mr. Wallace’s death from many corners of the industry:

Mike Wallace’s death robs broadcast news of one of founding fathers. Over 6 decades, set gold standard for interviewing //t.co/Q83Axg0e — Jon Williams (@WilliamsJon) 8 Apr 12

RIP Mike Wallace. Check out his 50s “Nightbeat” show on DuMont (!) network if YouTube has ’em: 1st to do confrontational interviews. — Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) 8 Apr 12

Tough questions are being asked in Heaven today. RIP Mike Wallace — Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) 8 Apr 12

Just heard of the passing of Mike Wallace. His stories on 60 Minutes were exceptional. A journalist many respected. Prayers to his family. — Robin Roberts (@RobinRoberts) 8 Apr 12

On a day of re-birth…sad news. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame has passed. Hopefully his legacy of asking tough questions lives on. — Chris Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) 8 Apr 12

By way of explaining his work, Mike Wallace once told an interviewer, “In the best of all possible worlds, everybody would be honorable, but that’s not the way the world works. Reputations for reporters are made by discovering things underneath that rock.”

In interviews after he retired, he said he would want his epitaph to read, “Tough but Fair.”