Let’s Keep Koppel in Perspective

Does an alcoholic or drug addict deserve a new liver? And what about that rash of pedophile priests? “Grabber” headlines from two successive shows from a certain TV “news” show of this past week. Jerry? Larry? A Geraldo rerun?

Guess again. It was Ted Koppel’s ABC News “Nightline.” The most “serious” of nightly news fare. And the program that was just spared the ax, at least temporarily, now that David Letterman came up with 31 million reasons a year to stay at CBS. All of which only confirms the notion that the national hand-wringing over “Nightline” these past 10 days--as if the very destiny of the republic hinged on Koppel’s nightly appearance--was woefully misplaced. Why should any of us care about the fate of so-called “serious” TV journalism? Koppel certainly has the chops to be a serious journalist. But these days, Ted and Cokie and Sam and the others are astronomically paid performers playing serious journalists. That is, unless you believe the profit-drunk guys in suits over at ABC are in the habit of paying actual journalists $8 million a year--about 50 times what a top flight newspaper correspondent might expect to earn at career peak.

The eventual demise of “Nightline,” and the scrubbing of network newscasts--indeed, the eradication of all “serious” news from TV--might actually be a step forward for American civilization and a real gift to future generations. Shows like “Nightline” feed a harmful fiction: that a person can be educated by watching serious TV news. But using the tube as an instrument of public instruction is like trying to use a hockey match to teach personal manners.

Back in 1854, when workers began laying the Transatlantic cable that would make instantaneous intercontinental communication a reality, Henry David Thoreau brilliantly foresaw that the global electronic buzz, by its very nature, would only inundate us with disconnected trivia. “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks closer to the New,” Thoreau wrote in “Walden.” “But perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Today, almost 150 years later, we’ve progressed only from the broad flapping ear to the ever-open eyeball, and from Princess Adelaide to Princess Di.

As New York University scholar Neil Postman and others have argued, the medium of television itself is plainly incompatible with real education. Television doesn’t just amplify and retransmit existing knowledge. Instead, it changes and, more importantly, subverts the very nature of knowledge. To think otherwise is to assume you could transmit the Encyclopaedia Britannica through a hand-shadow show. In a TV-marinated culture like ours, argument is replaced by pictures, history is replaced by soundbites, meditation by emotion, and ultimately, knowledge is replaced by opinion--often by not-particularly informed opinion. In the process, citizens are reduced to mere consumers, celebrities and movie actors are elevated above politicians and presidents, and the national discourse is degraded into a sort of simplistic baby talk.

Take the case of the “Nightline” show on organ transplants. If you watched far enough into the show, the issue turned out to be not that of convicts getting the liver transplants that should have gone to more upstanding recipients, as was implied in the episode’s set-up piece, but rather an issue of how America’s 50 million medically uninsured have little chance of a transplant. And yet, even the venerable “Nightline” took the low road, resorting to the lurid, tabloid tactic of hanging the whole story on one inmate who got a new liver. To have more honestly headlined the insurance crisis angle would have, presumably, been “too boring” for the needs of network TV.

A visceral, emotional, picture-driven medium like TV is best suited to transmit car crashes, rainstorms, freeway chases, brush-fires and mud-wrestling. That’s why, when TV does “news,” it relies so heavily on the above. And when TV pretends to propagate political debate, it naturally favors the gossip circuses like “Hardball,” “The McLaughlin Group,” or “Larry King Live.”

Koppel’s “Nightline,” the Sunday morning gasbag shows and the major networks’ nightly newscasts certainly have a style, tone and temper that are undoubtedly more sober and earnest than some of their local affiliates and cable TV counterparts. But the “language” of TV--especially in its hyper-commercial American idiom--remains anathema to context, exposition and narrative, the three prime prerequisites for any grasp of history and, consequently, of complex national or international politics.

Koppel’s emotional register might, in fact, be much cooler than, say, O’Reilly’s, but “Nightline” is just as much a slave to the demands of superficial immediacy as is “The O’Reilly Factor.” “Nightline’s” own creator, former ABC News (and Sports) President Roone Arledge, was widely quoted years ago saying he could tell within the first 30 seconds of each nightly broadcast whether or not that edition of “Nightline” would be compelling enough to hold its audience. Imagine with what horror Arledge or Koppel, or, for that matter, the audience would react if one night a “Nightline” guest would answer Ted’s first question by saying, “You know, Ted, that’s a complicated issue. Let me think about it overnight, and I’ll get back to you.”

Yet, it is precisely thinking in a linear and logical way, quietly reflecting, intensely interpreting, understanding context and weighing evidence and argument that opens the door to real knowledge. Those are skills learned from learning to read and by sustained and serious reading. By contrast, whether it’s Koppel or King, what TV mostly teaches us is how to watch television.

In this past week’s lamentations over “Nightline,” it has been endlessly repeated that today’s youth don’t want to watch serious TV news programs. Which begs this question: If today’s youth are products of a television era, and Koppel and company are the last remnants of some fading golden age of more serious TV journalism, then why didn’t some of that glory rub off on our kids? The answer, of course, was found in the historic study of TV viewing habits during last decade’s Gulf War, which revealed that the more you watched TV coverage of the conflict, the less you knew.

Perhaps in the near future all serious TV news will disappear. In that case we could celebrate two equally marvelous achievements. First, television would finally and formally be relegated to the lowly place it so richly deserves in the public educational hierarchy: somewhere between Etch-a-Sketch and Sony’s PlayStation 2. And second, we could get back to teaching our children that there are no easy short-cuts to education, knowledge, literacy and understanding of the world around us. There is only the old-fashioned way: reading.