Tuesday night marked the end of an era in broadcast journalism.
After a quarter-century at the helm of ABC’s “Nightline” program, Ted Koppel resigned gracefully from his post.
As print journalists, we usually find very little that is encouraging about television reporters, and all too often we can easily dismiss them as flimsy, ill-informed and egotistical. Koppel stands out from this gross generalization because he broke all these stereotypes.
His show, which usually explored just a single topic in the course of a program, was among the most thought-provoking news programs on television.
Over the years, Koppel was one of the few television journalists willing to take himself out of the spotlight and battle an unconvincing interviewee for the truth.
During the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, America watched as Koppel calmly hammered then-FEMA Director Michael Brown when he said the organization was just uncovering facts that journalists had been reporting for days.
Koppel was unflinching in his line of questioning.
“Don’t you guys watch television; don’t you listen to the radio? Our reporters have been reporting about it for more than just today,” he said.
On his last “Nightline” program, Koppel did not choose to do a soft-focus, clip-show retrospective, as many of his peers have done. Instead he focused on revisiting one of the most popular stories he told on the program: The last year in the life of a man with a terminal illness.
Sadly, this brand of broadcast journalism is a dying practice in an era when cable news anchors speculate first and ask questions later, or as Koppel put it, “being first with the obvious.”
As if to add insult to injury, ABC has picked some of the worst possible television personalities to replace Koppel. His successors include Martin Bashir, famous for his ridiculous exposes on Michael Jackson, Cynthia McFadden, who earned her stripes plugging away at the tabloid show “Primetime,” and Terry Moran, a non-offensive weekend news anchor. These three new co-anchors represent everything that Koppel was not.
It cannot be said that “Nightline” was a perfect journalistic endeavor, nor that Koppel was without flaws. But in a career that spanned four decades, he did many things right. We are sad to see him go.
A tribute to Ted Koppel’s tenacity on ‘Nightline’
Daily Emerald
November 22, 2005
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