If you have never seen Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline, tonight is your last chance to do so. The voice of reason in American tv News programs is leaving tonight. I have watched him on and off ever since I came to live here - my husband watches every single night. His arguments are reasoned, the programmes informative there's no hype or glitz and glamour and no scaremongering. It is to be so no more.
Starting next week Nightline will have three hosts - one of whom is the dreaded Martin Bashir. I rest my case.
The last bastion of GOOD network journalism in the United States is gone forever.
I grieve.
Bashir? What the hell are they thinking having that oaf on?
I feel for Koppel - he's absolutely right that in this day and age there is little difference between the 6 oclock news and Entertainment Tonight.
Firstly, I think Ted Koppel was the best thing on American news television, although Nightline has been going downhill a bit. The shape of things to come I fear. The programme came into being to add special late night coverage to what was happenning in Poland with the Solidarity revolution around 1980 or 1981, which shows how long he's been doing it.
People always said Walter Cronkite exuded a sense of trust in the American people. I never felt that watching him. Koppel on the other hand, far more than a news reader, more of an arbitrater of quite complex issues and ideas on the nearest thing American TV has to Newsnight, I felt was always scrupulously fair, hard-nosed yet gentlemanly and critically kept U.S administrations at arms length. Nightline went after Whitewater or the bombing of Kosovo just as vociferously as questions about the war in Iraq.
I think one of his major mistakes was allowing himself to be imbedded in the war, something he himself has talked about ruefully.
I saw a profile of Koppel the other day on the insipid early morning show on CNN 'Daybreak'. In an interview clip he said if he could leave one thought, it's that some of the most important news, didn't happen in the last five or fifteen minutes, but might have been something that happenned a few days, weeks or even months ago and that one thing he mourned about the trend in news was to only concentrate on the now.
Well, cut back to the CNN anchor Carol Costello and she's looking rather horriffied at this concept. She gives the camera one of those "well, it takes all sorts I guess" looks, before moving onto something doubtless much more important such as whether your pet is obese.
I'll miss him.