NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Ted Koppel is leaving ABC and the "Nightline" show
he has hosted since it started in 1980 -- making him the third high-profile news
anchor to leave a broadcast network in the last year.
The network announced Thursday that Koppel, a 42-year veteran of ABC News,
would leave when his current contract expires Dec. 4.
Nightline is the best daily news show on television now. It has been for some time and compared to the unending crap on CNN/Fox/MSNBC, it's positively fantastic. No word on the fate of Nightline. I suspect it will disappear too unless ABC is unable to come up with anything to compete with Leno/Letterman (oh please, not Jimmy Kimmel, please, please, please).
I witnessed Nightline's birth as an outgrowth of the coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both in late 1979. At first, it wasn't called Nightline, that didn't come until March of 1980. See, back in the 70's, with no cable news networks, the broadcast networks would provide extra coverage of big news events after the late local news, at 10:30 (not 10:35!) Central Time. They were generally called "Special Reports". With the Iranian and Afghanistan situations bringing nightly special reports for months on end, ABC decided to make it a regular news show.
Nightline has always been pretty straight-forward and unpretentious. Which means it really has no place in modern broadcasting.
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