Stay Tuned

After years of watching “Nightline,” aficionados may have concluded that Ted Koppel is a no-nonsense interviewer without much of a light touch. Right on the first part, wrong on the second. In his new chronicle of the last year of the 20th century, he drops any pretense of being an unbiased observer of the passing parade, and he does so in a breezy style that seems more typical of a coffee-table book than of a memoir.

Describing “Off Camera’s” style as breezy is not meant to disparage it. Koppel is a perceptive journalist with acute insights. Unfortunately, there is no single thread that connects his breathtaking array of material from Chechnya to Phnom Penh and Notre Dame football to women in prison. What does come across eloquently is Koppel’s concern for a free press. “We may prove to be altogether too successful in our current enthusiasm for blaming the media for everything from discouraging promising political candidates to the spread of toe fungus,” he writes. “It’s a tempting sport and to the best of my knowledge, mostly victimless, but we had bestbe careful. There is no denying that we reporters frequently present ourselves as irresistible targets, but the press continues to be an essential court of last resort, and those who undermine the public’s tolerance and support for that function do so at their own peril.”

“Nightline’s” longtime anchorman, one of the more irreverent figures in broadcasting, can also be amused by the incongruities of everyday life. A family man who adores his wife of 40 years, his adult children, sailing, fishing and watching football games, Koppel is slightly amused by the way his local supermarket is marketing Cap’n Crunch cereal, Hamburger Helper and Quaker Instant Oatmeal. But he also is understandably frustrated by the runaround Bell Atlantic bureaucrats give him as he tries to install a caller ID system in his home phone.

“Off Camera” covers the waterfront, perhaps too much of it. Koppel tells us about everyone from Bill Clinton, Paula Jones, Jimmy Carter, Warren Buffet and Muhammad Ali to the millionaire Michaels--Jordan and Eisner--and the late King Hussein of Jordan.

Though many of Koppel’s opinions may not be startling, the fact that they come from someone who has tried to distinguish himself from the blandness too often evident in broadcast journalism reinforces the obvious: Here’s a man with a point of view on everything from culture to racism in America to the United States commitment in Kosovo, to Elian Gonzalez and the ongoing problems of Arabs and Jews. He admires Bill Bradley “enormously, wishing that someone as smart and decent could become president”; on Bill Clinton and his impeachment trial, Koppel writes, “We will all have to witness this trashy spectacle so that Clinton can spend the rest of his life speculating on everything he might have achieved if his political enemies had not taken such shameless advantage of his open fly.”

Even Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball, which sold for $2.7 million at auction, does not escape his attention. “Who was it who said Americans know the price of everything and the value of nothing?” he asks. “I wonder why it is that so many rich people seem to feel the need to validate their wealth by accumulating the material evidence of someone else’s accomplishment.”

Koppel tells us about the two hours of private conversation he had with his multimillionaire boss, Michael Eisner, but not what they talked about. Should we care? Well yes, because Eisner, the man who runs Disney, which owns the American Broadcasting Co. and its subsidiary, ABC News, is one of the more elusive moguls in Hollywood. Koppel obviously had and has an entree, having been with the boss on boxing and bicycling expeditions.

You cannot help but wonder if one of network television’s toughest interviewers got around to asking Eisner during one of those trips about his views on the challenges facing a free press, the value of network news coverage in the years ahead, or his commitment to ABC’s investigative journalism even when it is critical of entertainment companies like Disney. In an age in which broadcast journalism increasingly is controlled by a handful of corporate giants like Disney, it would have been interesting to know how Eisner might have reacted to this entry in Koppel’s chronicle:

There never “has been a time when more citizens of a nation are, simultaneously, affluent and depressed. The America of 1999 is living proof of the cliche that money does not bring happiness. Many people are indisputably fortunate to live in this country,” says Koppel, “yet these Americans do not strike me, by and large, as a happy people. There is a sullen edge to our satisfaction. . . . Our toys don’t do it. Our houses and vacation condos don’t do it. Two cars are not enough. . . . The richest people I know tend by and large to be the unhappiest.”

So, is Eisner happy or not? Is he going to make more demands for corporate profits from ABC and its news division? We don’t know if Koppel asked him because he has chosen not to tell us.

*

In “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday,” Garrick Utley has tackled a more ambitious subject, tracing a career instead of a year. This engaging memoir, subtitled “A Life in Television News,” walks us through the pages of history that Utley observed as a correspondent and anchorman during the last half of the 20th century. Utley labored in the vineyards of NBC News, ABC News and CNN and managed to be present at many of the major stories of our time: Saigon and Berlin to Prague and Moscow, the Sinai Desert and the heart of Africa, where he was far more than a parachute journalist jumping in and out of one crisis area after another. He has thought intelligently and written engagingly about the historical antecedents that caused him to move from place to place.

The story of how he had to forsake a birthday celebration with his wife because of a crisis in Holland involving marauding immigrants from the Molucca Islands of Indonesia will resonate with most married foreign correspondents. Or, for that matter, any other married couple whose lives constantly are or were interrupted by the unforeseen demands of their work.

Utley writes amusingly about how he broke into broadcasting at the knee of his father, one of the Midwest’s most distinguished anchormen. He describes and reflects on the end of the Cold War in the heart of Europe, and he concludes thoughtfully with several chapters about the challenges facing television and where it is heading. Having launched his career during the days when television relied on black-and-white film and cumbersome cameras, Utley is not a crabby Cassandra bemoaning the future of the medium. Instead, he sounds a note of optimism that almost seems excessive given the trivialization of so much news and the shrinking commitment to international coverage by the networks and other broadcast outlets, as well as the public’s declining interest in it.

We may admire the new technology and the diversity of ways to deliver the news via cable, satellites, the Internet and, yes, even 24-hour chat rooms. But without the commitment to underwrite the cost of producing and reporting accurate and compelling news, we will sink deeper into the swamp of tabloid journalism that offers the American people impressions of their cities, the nation and the world that are at odds with reality.

His optimism aside, Utley concedes that “what is being lost or at least eroded is the role of network news as the unifying central nervous system of information for the nation. Some may mourn this, especially those who grew up in the age of network news.”

Koppel, for his part, worries that the growth of the media industry “will be so insistent and uncontrolled that the very values of a free and open press are threatened.”

He is right to worry.