Ted Koppel had been stubbornly resisting ABC’s occasional overtures to take over This Week, the network’s also-ran Washington public-affairs show, for a decade. But now, four years after retiring from ABC News, the former Nightline anchor is finally interested.
According to my sources, Koppel has been talking to ABC News President David Westin, who previously tried to lure him into rescuing the program—No. 1 for much of David Brinkley’s 15-year reign—as far back as the late 1990s and again in 2005, when it was struggling in third place behind Tim Russert’s Meet the Press at NBC and Bob Schieffer’s Face the Nation at CBS.
“He’s much too old for that job,” quipped the longtime moderator of Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer, who at 72 is three years Koppel’s senior.
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Koppel’s loyal friend and longtime producer, Tom Bettag, has also been phoning Westin, ostensibly to assure him that he and Koppel “are not a matched pair” and that Bettag has no wish to big-foot This Week’s current executive producer, Ian Cameron. (Read: Bettag would definitely love to return to ABC as executive producer for his old pal Ted.)
• David Gregory on Koppel and His First Year The 69-year-old Koppel, who launched Nightline in 1980 and turned it into must-see appointment television with his authoritative baritone, razor-sharp interviewing style, and leonine hair, is the only marquee name being mentioned as a replacement for This Week host George Stephanopoulos, who formally signed off Sunday to concentrate on co-hosting Good Morning America. Some at ABC thought Stephanopoulos’ move to New York was a mistake, coming just as he was establishing himself as the class of the Sunday-morning field and gaining on NBC’s David Gregory, the late Russert’s replacement.
Although many believe that an offer is on the table, ABC sources insisted to me that Koppel and Westin haven’t even started bargaining, notwithstanding a recent report of a million-dollar fee for hosting three Sundays a month. Meanwhile, other candidates such as White House correspondent Jake Tapper and Nightline anchor Terry Moran are still very much in the mix, and Tapper and Moran are trading off Sundays as interim (that is, auditioning) hosts.
Koppel, who was making a reported $7 million a year when he left the network, is a tough-as-nails negotiator who doesn’t use an agent. He represents himself, aided by his lawyer-wife Grace Anne, who is also said to cut his amazing mane. Nobody knows better than Westin that Koppel doesn’t work cheap and likes to take time off—two of the probable sticking points. In an email, Koppel declined to comment, saying he would prefer to wait until “after the This Week dust has settled.” Westin didn’t return my phone call.
But several insiders have been wondering this week if Westin is cooling on the Koppel idea, and whether Koppel has passed his sell-by date.
“He’s much too old for that job,” quipped the longtime moderator of Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer, who at 72 is three years Koppel’s senior.
On a more serious note, Schieffer cautioned that the business has changed radically, and not for the better, since Koppel left broadcast television to make big-budget documentaries for the Discovery Channel. (He departed the cable outlet in 2008 and these days provides political commentary to NPR and the BBC, with an occasional cameo on The Daily Show.) Network audience share is dwindling, advertising revenue is shriveling, and the once-flush news divisions are pinching pennies.
“I sometimes feel like the last of the Mohicans here,” Schieffer told me. “These outfits are just so strapped for money—we can’t spend a dime at CBS. We have a very small staff. These news organizations have shrunk so much in size that you don’t have the large bench like they used to. When I came to CBS in 1969, I was the 26th reporter in the Washington bureau. Walter Cronkite was the anchor, but you also had people like Dan Rather and Roger Mudd waiting in the wings. Now you’ve got a bunch of smart young kids, but you don’t have really any of the 45- to 50-year-olds who are really old enough to think of as anchors of the evening news.” The reason, of course, is that experienced talent is expensive.
While Koppel would have instant authority and recognition with the older-skewing Sunday-morning audience, and give Gregory and Schieffer a run for their money, would he be willing to adjust to the new normal of network news? Koppel came up in the era of Westin’s predecessor, the late Roone Arledge, who built ABC News on a foundation of fabulously paid personalities such as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Peter Jennings, and Koppel. Under Arledge’s glittering regime, the four were essentially treated like Hollywood stars. During the 1980s and 1990s, they were so powerful, each with his own fiefdom, that they were practically running the news division. “Anchormonsters” was the ABC News term of art. Those days are long gone.
“If they had someone automatic, they’d have had a deal by now,” said another network veteran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Ted would be an interim host; he would not be the permanent host… How long was Brokaw at Meet the Press after Russert died? Six months? ”
On the other hand, this veteran believes that the Koppel mojo is alive and well. “With Ted, and the kind of professional he is, the question is: Does he still know how to do it, given the fact that time has moved on? And I’d say the answer is yes.”
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
