Word: koppel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...outset of last week's televised debate among eight Democratic presidential candidates, Ted Koppel smiled into the camera and said, "The moderator will try to have complete control." That drew a laugh, but as usual, he was in earnest. Indeed, during the half of the debate that he moderated, Koppel, cool and cerebral, kept the discussion crisply controlled-and confirmed his reputation as perhaps the best serious interviewer on American...
...Koppel, 43, has established himself as the thinking person's anchor on ABC's late-evening news show Nightline, which since March 1980 has built an average audience ranging from 5.1 million to 6.8 million viewers for discussions of issues as sensitive as child abuse and as complex as nuclear war games. Unlike the early-evening anchors, who help select stories but have little role in the coverage of most of them, Koppel controls almost every word that is spoken during Nightline. Most of each show is live interviews conducted by him. Often he must interweave five...
...Koppel is adroit at interpreting other people's answers without seeming to put words into their mouths. He neatly exposes hypocrisy, but without raising his voice or resorting to rhetoric. On occasion he can become testy, as he did while interviewing a California district attorney who jailed a twelve-year-old for refusing to testify against her stepfather; but when he does let his feelings show, he quickly apologizes on air. His buttoned-down style and unflappable calm could make him seem dull, but he works with express-train speed and almost never lets an interview become repetitive...
...Hampshire debate may have been Koppel's most sensitive assignment ever, and he handled it ably but with restraint. He explains, "I could not be quite as tough as on Nightline. The point was not for me to elicit any particular piece of information or to trap someone in an inconsistency." Still, some of the discussion displayed him at his deflating best. When the candidates talked about cutting the military budget, Koppel asked which domestic military bases they considered unnecessary. When they kept emphasizing that none of them downgrade the importance of peace, Koppel noted, "In fairness...
Four days later, Koppel took on another demanding showcase: his occasional ABC series Viewpoint, a live discussion of journalistic ethics with comment from the public. The show focused on the conflicting demands of freedom of information and national security. Among Koppel's strengths is that he almost never indulges in special pleading for his craft. Although he is somewhat conservative in a business that Viewpoint participants lambasted as liberal, Koppel was careful not to interject his views...