Is TV News Doing Its Job?

There is much about today’s television news that Ted Koppel does not find cool. Clueless cable TV anchors, opinionated broadcasts and unfiltered blogs and Tweets masquerading as journalism all trouble him. It’s reasonable criticism from a man who honed his craft during the golden age of network TV broadcast news anchored by iconic figures such as Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

At age 26, Koppel became the youngest full-time correspondent ever hired by ABC News, for which he covered Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., the Vietnam War and numerous other historical events over the years. His thorough reporting and tough questioning became a hallmark that viewers came to expect and defined him as a journalist. As the anchor and managing editor of ABC’s Nightline over a period of 26 years—roughly 6,000 programs—he was the longest-serving news anchor in broadcast network history. After leaving the program in 2005, Koppel served as managing editor of the Discovery Channel, where he produced 20 hours of documentaries on global topics. These days, he’s part of an all-star lineup on Rock Center with Brian Williams, a weekly TV news magazine, a commentator for NPR and a contributing columnist for The New York Times and The Washington Post.

During his distinguished career, he has remained stalwart in his conviction to uphold the highest standards of journalism. Koppel, who occasionally retreats to his place on Captiva Island, talked with Gulfshore Life about the state of TV news during a phone interview. With his familiar baritone voice and articulate delivery—mixed with wry humor and an affable manner—he laid out his case.

Gulfshore Life: A poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University in November showed that FOX News viewers are less informed than people who watch no news at all. Has the proliferation of similar broadcast outlets dumbed people down?

Ted Koppel: I think what’s made news less useful in terms of conveying hard information is simply the fact that (a) there has been this proliferation and (b) the proliferation was caused by the need to attract audiences, now that the pie has to be sliced in so many more pieces [because of cable TV and other viewing choices]. Instead of going out and gathering news and delivering that in a factual and objective fashion, the various outlets are trying to find different groups of people to whom they can appeal with a particular take on the news. What [News Corp. chief] Rupert Murdoch and [FOX president] Roger Ailes found in particular was that there was a genuine hunger among the American news consumers for news with more of an editorial slant in the conservative direction. Well, they got it, and FOX has been hugely successful. I’m familiar with that survey and what it doesn’t point out is that FOX has made many hundreds of millions of dollars doing what it’s doing and become so successful that it has encouraged others to follow that same path.

GL: Are audiences making the distinction between hard news and opinionated broadcasting?

Koppel: Viewers have to ask themselves a fairly simple series of questions: If you are going to any other professional in your life, whether that’s a CPA or a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist, are you going to go to the man or woman who tells you what you want to hear, or are you going to go to the man or woman who tells what you need to hear? We have more of a tendency these days to go with the expert who tells us what we want to hear. But it doesn’t take a great deal of reflection to realize that sooner or later that’s going to rear up and bite you in the place where it hurts. I’m inclined to think that as the situation gets worse, and by the situation I mean the various international crises in which the United States has a greater or lesser stake—the economic crisis, the housing crisis, the employment crisis—as each of these things bites a little harder, I think there is a larger segment of the population that is starting to say ‘You know, I’m really getting awfully tired of news coverage in which everyone is telling me what they think I want to hear.’

GL: Where can people go to get an accurate contextual news report on TV?

Koppel: Well, ironically I find myself turning more and more to broadcasting outlets from outside the country, to the BBC for example. When it comes to news in the Middle East, right now I’m getting far more news from Al Jazeera than I’m getting from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, any of those folks. FOX, they’re not covering it. Last night’s news—you and I are talking on Valentine’s Day—was pretty much taken up with certainly a sad event [Whitney Houston’s death], and I consider it to be obviously a news story that needs to be covered. But is the death of a popular singer, as great as she may have been, two days after the event, still the most important issue in the world? In other words, should that be the lead? And my answer to that is no. I fully understand that there’s a public appetite to know what happened and to grieve with the family, but that’s not as important as what’s going on in Syria or in Greece or in our own housing crisis.

GL: You began your career when broadcasts were anchored by pioneers like Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. How does the current lineup of major network anchors match up against those earlier ones?