Word: koppell
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Taking His Camera and Going Home SAN DIEGO: For Ted Koppel, even the chance to rub shoulders with Newt, Bob and Jack isn't worth sticking it out at the Republican convention any longer. The Nightline host is heading home, claiming that amid the puffery and made-for-TV grandstanding, there just isn't any news to cover at the GOP pow-wow. Koppel is taking most of his crew along, and says he won't bother even showing up at the Democratic Convention. "This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event," Koppel said...
...KOPPEL Talk of a possible departure from ABC is likely to fuel sales of his new book about Nightline...
...Koppel, the show's masterly anchorman, is certainly entitled to toot his own horn, and Nightline: History in the Making and the Making of Television, which he has co-authored with former Nightline producer Kyle Gibson (Times Books; 477 pages; $25), has its self-indulgent excesses. It is essentially a scrapbook of the show's milestones, major interviews, bookers' war stories and amusing anecdotes, which can dribble on like one of those endless Nightline "town meetings...
...book offers candid assessments of the show's less stellar moments as well. Koppel, we learn, never liked the idea of doing a show on comedian John Belushi's death--especially when the only show-biz "friend" of his the show managed to book was Milton Berle. Koppel's choice for the all-time worst Nightline is a 1985 interview with Le Duc Tho, in which the former North Vietnamese negotiator rattled on interminably (as fellow guest Henry Kissinger fumed) because his interpreter refused to convey Koppel's desperate efforts to stop him. A rare guest who Koppel says...
Mostly, though, Koppel nails others. If the book lacks larger consideration of Nightline's place in the TV-news universe, it does offer a fine appreciation of Koppel's interviewing technique. He has always stood apart for his unmatched ability to focus, his knack for cutting through obfuscation. With Jim and Tammy Bakker, Koppel recalls that he was "worried about going after them too hard," yet jumped in as soon as the televangelists started quoting Scripture: "Is it going to be possible to get through an interview with both of you without you wrapping yourselves in the Bible?" To Michael...