His Night in the Sun

In his 42 years at ABC, and especially in his quarter-century at "Nightline," Koppel seemingly has conducted every kind of interview. He's talked to Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali, Larry Flynt and Ginger Rogers, Chuck D and Buzz Aldrin. He famously quizzed Gary Hart about adultery, told Michael Dukakis he just didn't get it and swatted down the racial views of baseball executive Al Campanis, who lost his job over the interview.

He also has reported from around the world -- a foray to South Africa in the 1980s made news worldwide -- and, more recently, covered the 2003 Iraq war amid the tanks in the desert. Just last week, "Nightline" did a show on Zimbabwe ruler Robert Mugabe's devastating impact on his country -- not the sort of thing other programs are clamoring to cover.

Television executives, Koppel says, "live under the misapprehension that Americans don't care about foreign news. They don't care about boring news. If you present it in a boring fashion, then they don't care about foreign news. What really dictates here is the cost of foreign news. At a time that we really have to worry about what's going on in the rest of the world, what people in other countries think of us, we are less well informed by television news than we have been in many years.

"If the only time you cover foreign news is when you send someone, every foreign story is going to cost you a lot of money when you do it and likely to be less well informed than in the days when you had people who lived in the country for two, three, five, 10 years and understand the culture."

In a been-there-done-that media culture, Koppel relished the idea of returning to his signature issues again and again: the Middle East, South Africa, AIDS, racism, crime and punishment. Asked whether evening newscasts do the same thing, he says: "There's a huge difference between coming back to a story and devoting 2 1/2 minutes to it, and the next time 1:45, and what we have done when we focused on an issue for two, three or four programs." Taking the show to such places as Congo -- which Koppel says has "an invisible war which barely exists even in newspapers" -- boosted the ratings and burnished the program's reputation. "But it's a very expensive thing to do and it's also thoroughly exhausting."

Koppel relishes the contrarian role. In 1996 he created a major stir by packing up and leaving the Republican National Convention in San Diego, saying no news was being committed there. "In the intervening years," he says, "guess what? Everyone's come to the conclusion that conventions really aren't worth covering, except on cable."

Last week Koppel committed news himself when he appeared to endorse Charlie Gibson, the "Good Morning America" co-host who has been doing part-time duty on the evening news, as ABC's next anchor. Koppel says he was just responding to a specific question about Gibson from a TV Guide reporter.

"I do think Charlie Gibson would make an absolutely splendid anchor," he says. But noting the rise of "GMA" under Gibson and Diane Sawyer, he says, "Those morning shows are moneymaking machines. Changing such a successful equation could cost you tens of millions of dollars."

Koppel and Bettag say they will not make a deal with another media outlet until their departure -- although they have had talks with HBO -- but say there is a vacuum in long-form reporting that they intend to fill. Still, they are leaving a very big stage.

"You can't help but have mixed feelings," Bettag says. "Trying to wean yourself away from the daily news adrenaline is no small thing. But this is something we've planned for a very long time. Ted is very much at peace with this."

Koppel plans to take a few months off, but "I'm not going to slide into semi-retirement," he says. "Nothing lights my fire more than a big story out there and going out to cover it."