[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 148 (Wednesday, November 9, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2313-E2314]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     TED KOPPEL: HE KNOWS THE BURDEN OF THE IRAQ WAR MUST BE SHARED

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                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, November 9, 2005

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to appreciate the career and 
character of Ted Koppel, who is retiring after 25 years as a stalwart 
and honest news reporter on the show ``Nightline.''
  Upon his retirement, he expressed some thoughts in the November 8, 
2005 issue of the Washington Post. I applauded him then and I applaud 
him now for showing the photographs and naming the fallen in 
Afghanistan and Iraq on his show when others called him unpatriotic for 
that act to honor those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. I applaud him 
for his statement in the Washington Post today. He remarked on the 
unshared burden of the war in Iraq. This is a topic I have brought up 
again and again. One tiny fraction of this nation bears the entire 
burden of this war.
  Ted Koppel put it this way: ``You don't fight a war and allow just a 
tiny fraction of the population to carry the burden. It's hard to make 
a case that the rest of us are sharing the burden of being at war when 
our taxes have been cut, not increased. There are no victory gardens. 
No one is being asked to do anything, really. That's why I thought it 
was important to show all those photographs and read all those names. . 
. .''
  Ted, thank you. You have done a wonderful job for 25 years. Your 
honest reporting will be missed.

                [From the Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2005]

                          His Night in the Sun


   After 25 Years, Ted Koppel Is Leaving the Show That Did It His Way

                           (By Howard Kurtz)

       Given all the heat Ted Koppel took last year for reading 
     the names of the hundreds of Americans killed in Iraq, he 
     could be forgiven for claiming vindication over the huge 
     coverage when the death toll hit 2,000 late last month.
       The ``Nightline'' anchor believes a meaningless milestone 
     was overplayed by the media--and is happy to tell you why.
       ``If the administration was really doing what it ought to 
     be doing, they--everyone from the president on down--would 
     have explained we have to remain in Iraq with such clarity 
     that everyone would understand the sacrifice of 2,000, or 
     even 20,000, lives is essential,'' he says. ``My complaint is 
     that the administration has done a poor job of explaining why 
     we're in Iraq. You don't fight a war and allow just a tiny 
     fraction of the population to carry the burden. It's hard to 
     make the case that the rest of us are sharing in the burden 
     of being at war when our taxes have been cut, not increased. 
     There are no victory gardens. No one is being asked to do 
     anything, really. That's why I thought it was important to 
     show all those photographs and read all those names, not as a 
     way of saying the war is wrong.''

[[Page E2314]]

       It is classic Koppel: tough-minded, eloquent, focused on 
     world affairs and sometimes, it seems, conducting his own 
     foreign policy. As he prepares to relinquish the helm of the 
     ABC program he launched 26 years ago, when his focus was 
     entirely on Iran and the Americans held hostage there, it is 
     hard to avoid the end-of-an-era language that followed the 
     departures of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather and the death of 
     Peter Jennings.
       ``This is easily perceived as the fourth 20-year-plus 
     anchor stepping aside, and that's not the case,'' says 
     Executive Producer Tom Bettag, who plans to launch a 
     reporting venture with Koppel after they leave ABC. Perhaps 
     their greatest accomplishment, Bettag says, is that the 
     program will continue after Koppel's last night, Nov. 22, 
     with an anchor triumvirate of Cynthia McFadden, Terry Moran 
     and Martin Bashir. ``A number of people said once Ted goes, 
     there goes `Nightline.' ''
       One thing that will be lost with the new incarnation's 
     wide-ranging format is what Koppel, 65, always has boasted 
     about: an in-depth look at one subject each night. Does that 
     bother him? ``I don't want to begin by prejudging what's 
     going to be done, because it may be terrific,'' he says. ``I 
     don't want this to be interpreted as Ted saying the new 
     approach ain't going to work.''
       Koppel announced his resignation in March after ABC News 
     President David Westin decided he wanted ``Nightline''--the 
     ratings of which have been slipping in recent years--to be 
     live at 11:35 p.m. Koppel had no desire to work such a 
     schedule, and always has argued that the program is live when 
     it needs to be live and otherwise there is no point in having 
     guests wait around all evening.
       ``At some point, it would probably be time to pull out 
     anyway,'' says Koppel, who served notice five years ago that 
     he and Bettag wanted to phase themselves out gradually. 
     Koppel had hoped that Chris Bury would succeed him as 
     anchor--Bury and John Donvan will remain as 
     correspondents, most likely joined by Vicki Mabrey from 
     CBS--and that former producer Leroy Sievers would replace 
     Bettag. But management, which hired British journalist 
     James Goldston to run the program, had other ideas.
       ``It's their broadcast in the final analysis,'' Koppel 
     says. ``I've always taken the position it's our job to make 
     the program as attractive to the audience as we could 
     possibly make it, but there are limits. You don't bring on 
     dancing girls.''
       That's not an entirely frivolous comment, given that 
     Koppel's competition includes Jay Leno and David Letterman. 
     In fact, ABC tried to junk the show three years ago by luring 
     Letterman from CBS. Koppel fought back, criticizing ABC and 
     parent company Disney in a New York Times op-ed.
       ``I never questioned the corporation's right to do that,'' 
     he says. ``This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to 
     make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The 
     programming that is put on between those commercials is 
     simply the bait we put in the mousetrap.
       ``If it is true that David Letterman can draw a lot more 
     viewers than `Nightline' and Ted Koppel, if you can make an 
     extra $30 million or $50 million a year, I absolutely 
     understand they not only have the right but the fiduciary 
     obligation to do that. I just don't think they did it the 
     best way in terms of the handling of it. We were among the 
     last to learn about it. You just don't do that to people who 
     have worked hard for you for a long time.''
       In his 42 years at ABC, and especially in his quarter-
     century at ``Nightline,'' Koppel seemingly has conducted 
     every kind of interview. He's talked to Nelson Mandela and 
     Muhammad Ali, Larry Flynt and Ginger Rogers, Chuck D and Buzz 
     Aldrin. He famously quizzed Gary Hart about adultery, told 
     Michael Dukakis he just didn't get it and swatted down the 
     racial views of baseball executive Al Campanis, who lost his 
     job over the interview.
       He also has reported from around the world--a foray to 
     South Africa in the 1980s made news worldwide--and, more 
     recently, covered the 2003 Iraq war amid the tanks in the 
     desert. Just last week, ``Nightline'' did a show on Zimbabwe 
     ruler Robert Mugabe's devastating impact on his country--not 
     the sort of thing other programs are clamoring to cover.
       Television executives, Koppel says, ``live under the 
     misapprehension that Americans don't care about foreign news. 
     They don't care about boring news. If you present it in a 
     boring fashion, then they don't care about foreign news. What 
     really dictates here is the cost of foreign news. At a time 
     that we really have to worry about what's going on in the 
     rest of the world, what people in other countries think of 
     us, we are less well informed by television news than we have 
     been in many years.
       ``If the only time you cover foreign news is when you send 
     someone, every foreign story is going to cost you a lot of 
     money when you do it and likely to be less well informed than 
     in the days when you had people who lived in the country for 
     two, three, five, 10 years and understand the culture.''
       In a been-there-done-that media culture, Koppel relished 
     the idea of returning to his signature issues again and 
     again: the Middle East, South Africa, AIDS, racism, crime and 
     punishment. Asked whether evening newscasts do the same 
     thing, he says: ``There's a huge difference between coming 
     back to a story and devoting 2\1/2\ minutes to it, and the 
     next time 1:45, and what we have done when we focused on an 
     issue for two, three or four programs.'' Taking the show to 
     such places as Congo--which Koppel says has ``an invisible 
     war which barely exists even in newspapers''--boosted the 
     ratings and burnished the program's reputation. ``But it's a 
     very expensive thing to do and it's also thoroughly 
     exhausting.''
       Koppel relishes the contrarian role. In 1996 he created a 
     major stir by packing up and leaving the Republican National 
     Convention in San Diego, saying no news was being committed 
     there. ``In the intervening years,'' he says, ``guess what? 
     Everyone's come to the conclusion that conventions really 
     aren't worth covering, except on cable.''
       Last week Koppel committed news himself when he appeared to 
     endorse Charlie Gibson, the ``Good Morning America'' co-host 
     who has been doing part-time duty on the evening news, as 
     ABC's next anchor. Koppel says he was just responding to a 
     specific question about Gibson from a TV Guide reporter.
       ``I do think Charlie Gibson would make an absolutely 
     splendid anchor,'' he says. But noting the rise of ``GMA'' 
     under Gibson and Diane Sawyer, he says, ``Those morning shows 
     are moneymaking machines. Changing such a successful equation 
     could cost you tens of millions of dollars.''
       Koppel and Bettag say they will not make a deal with 
     another media outlet until their departure--although they 
     have had talks with HBO--but say there is a vacuum in long-
     form reporting that they intend to fill. Still, they are 
     leaving a very big stage.
       ``You can't help but have mixed feelings,'' Bettag says. 
     ``Trying to wean yourself away from the daily news adrenaline 
     is no small thing. But this is something we've planned for a 
     very long time. Ted is very much at peace with this.''
       Koppel plans to take a few months off, but ``I'm not going 
     to slide into semi-retirement,'' he says. ``Nothing lights my 
     fire more than a big story out there and going out to cover 
     it.''

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