Ted Koppel: A broadcaster who shoots questions like bullets wrapped in silk
Ted Koppel is not only one of the most famous broadcasters in USA, or perhaps in the world, but also the most honoured. The multi-awarding winning Koppel worked as an anchor, foreign and domestic correspondent and bureau chief of ABC News for more than a decade. His rise began on November 8, 1979 when he did a special broadcast on the US diplomats and embassy staffers taken hostage in Iran. The show was named Nightline, and very quickly it became a source of the latest, in-depth information on the evening’s biggest story. The show dominated American TV screens for 25 years, and in November 2005, Koppel stepped down from Nightline and also left ABC after 42 years with the network. Traditionally, his final Nightline broadcast should have featured clips highlighting the memorable interviews he did on the show. Instead, the show replayed Koppel’s 1995 interview with retired Brandeis University sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was a highly acclaimed episode of Nightline. And for the final broadcast, Koppel interviewed sports journalist Mitch Albom, a former student of Schwartz. Albom talked about how the Nightline episode featuring Shwartz inspired him to contact the dying professor, and then visit him weekly. He wrote a book based on those visits and lessons about life he learned by talking to Shwartz, titled Tuesdays With Morrie, which quickly became one of the bestsellers. I first met Koppel in the summer of 1985 when I was covering then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Washington, months after he took power following the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi was very popular among the Americans who saw him standing behind the rising flames of his mother’s funeral pyre, as if he was being baptized. Koppel had invited Rajiv for an interview on Nightline. Both men found each other to be very calm and polite and had honesty writ large on their smiling faces. But when the cameras rolled, it became the most hard-hitting interview the Indian Prime Minister had ever given. That is when I learnt that when you are interviewing someone and asking him some tough questions, there is no need for you to look tough and have an accusing tone in your voice. Instead, you should kill your subject ‘softly’ with your smile. I can’t forget one of Koppel’s famous lines about being a journalist:“My function is to present reality to people out there, as objectively and accurately as I can, and doing that as quickly as we do is quite difficult enough.” As for news, Koppel says today the Americans should demand from the TV channels to get back to real news, with better reporting and better editing. He told C-Span that those cable channels are promoting “ideological news” which is neither good for America, nor good for any democracy. Network news reports may seem objective, he said, but at the same time he complained that ABC, CBS and NBC are simply not putting “the money into the reporting that is necessary for democracy.” During a discussion on journalism, he told another veteran journalist, Marvin Kalb, that to know what is really happening in the world, he listens to BBC or Al-Jazeera. Koppel strongly believes that his personal opinion has no place in the news. It is good that information today can be disseminated so quickly, he says, but when snippets of information reported on blogs get passed as fact, it becomes dangerous for democracy. Koppel is also known for his concern about the inherent problems of the new technologies. “Every time we search on our laptop, we give out information about ourselves, our biases and our preferences”. The example he gives to prove his point is that when a conservative American searches on his computer for all the articles on any one topic, he gets on his screen an entirely different set of articles as compared to what appears on the screen when a liberal does a similar search on the same topic. Another problem, he says, is that today’s TV channels are infatuated with the ability to get things out quickly. Much cable news is unscripted and comes off the top of the head. He says it is unfortunate that people love to listen to the shouting brawls and that cable networks make their money by showing nasty exchanges and the name-calling. When intelligent journalism has lower audiences in a democracy, that is bad news, he says. (Author/analyst Ravi M. Khanna has covered South Asia for Voice of America from Washington and New Delhi for more than 24 years.) Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
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