| Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail as you surely will adjust your lives, not the standards.
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 The courage, the vision and the integrity of a genuine journalist.
October 11, 2000 By Linda Henderson
nsnews staff
Ted Koppel is my favorite journalist because he is independent minded, and that is
certainly rare and refreshing in an era of unprecedented, ditto-head reporting. In the main,
Ted Koppel is a journalist who has earned the public trust, and that is the difference
between the distinguished gentleman and the hoard of screeching blabber mouths who
compromise most of the rest of the media. In 1896, the credo of the New York Times was
"to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect or
interest involved.," and while Ted Koppel works for ABC news, the standards of every
good journalist are the same. Moreover, when we acknowledge the contribution of the
very best and the brightest, we inadvertently betray the irresponsible, toxic contribution of
malpractice, masquerade journalists like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Isikoff and Chris
Matthews. Just an aside, Chris Matthews recently flattered Rush Limbaugh by telling him
that legions of supporters across the country believe that he is the last great patriot. Does
that make anybody laugh, or it it just me? Did Chris Matthews, who evidently fancies
great patriots, steal President Carter's 1980 debate documents and deliver them to
Republican challenger Ronald Reagan where they mysteriously surfaced, or was that some
other great patriot? Most journalists, save the great patriots, are too busy to develop the notion that Rush Limbaugh is the last great patriot, and it is only because we rely upon people like Chris Matthews to betray delusions of grandeur, that we are made aware of
the fact. This little digression is over, back to the real story.
The best thing about Ted Koppel is that he is not a charter member of the politically
motivated, media pack. And what does the politically motivated media pack do? Just to
take one example, consider the current effort to create rage and fury over the fact that
Ralph Nader has been excluded from participation in the presidential debate. The media
has turned a perfectly understandable exclusion into a big story that is repeated over and
over and over again. Nader-mania has inflicted the college crowd in particular, and that is
certainly understandable because college students are quicker on the draw when it comes
to the denial of freedom. At the same time, perhaps some are not mature enough to
acknowledge the fact that responsibility is the cornerstone of freedom in a democracy, and
they need to further debate the issue, to fully understand it. When Ted Koppel was asked about the presidential debate exclusion of Nader and Buchanan, it didn’t even take a
minute to betray the obvious:
No, no, I mean you set the rules up -and the rules were pretty clear on that. What was it,
you had to have at least 15% they’re both ranking about 2%, 3% right now. You can’t do
that because my understanding of it is you would have to include at least 3 other guys who
are running. So you would have had not 2 people, not 4 people, you would have had 9
people.
Ralph Nader is excluded from the presidential debates, not because he deserves
round-the-clock, positive publicity on the issue, but because he has failed to galvanize
enough public support to be a viable, presidential candidate. Clearly, despite the
hyper-publicity, Ralph Nader is merely a media-fabricated screech who is easy picking
when it comes to fodder for exploitation because he is a household name. In the final
analysis, it is a very sad chapter in the life of a very good man, because he deserves so
much more than to be the pawn of a Republican wet dream. Republicans who lament the
claim that Ross Perot destroyed George Bush’s re-election bid may hope that Nader can
destroy Gore’s candidacy, but that should not be the basis of the media inflated support
that Nader is receiving. Recall that Ross Perot participated in the presidential debate
because he satisfied minimal requirements, and the frustrated media pack unleashed a
torrent of anti-Perot publicity for much the same reasons that it is waiting for this election
to be over, before it bursts Nader’s bubble.
Ralph Nader is a respected consumer advocate and a household name to boot, and it
would be a terrible public disservice for him to allow the media to squander his influence.
Is it not Ralph Nader’s responsibility to expose the hypocrisy which is responsible for the
disproportionate media attention he has received during this election cycle? Perhaps it is
the media’s responsibility to be accurate and to reject the artificial inflation of popularity,
and perhaps Nader’s commitment to advocacy has temporarily blindsighted his ability to
be fair to all sides. Perhaps, and Nader should be the first to acknowledge, everything will
sort itself out, as long as the consumer does not pay the final price.
In the meantime, journalists like Ted Koppel pick up the slack because their commitment
to be fair and impartial is not consistent to the media pack tendency of inflating the
significance of Ralph Nader for the sake of targeting Al Gore. You can certainly ignore
the hypocrisy of temporary tolerance, but you sacrifice your integrity in the process.
One of the ways to gauge the quality of the journalist is to listen to what he or she says
about journalism and about the Internet. Insecure journalists implicitly or explicitly
disparage the Internet and betray a fear of what they perceive to be low level competition.
Ted Koppel embraces the Internet without fear and with the clear understanding that
competition merely heightens the demand for good journalists. Indeed, Ted Koppel is so
secure and so confident about the fact that the importance of fair and impartial reporters
will never wane, that he invites everybody to pick up a pen and paper, and to become a
journalist. In his own words:
One of the great things about the first amendment is that it does make anybody who
wants to be, a journalist. In this country you don’t have to have a license to be a journalist,
you don’t have to have passed a test to be a journalist, you don’t have to have any
professional training to be a journalist, you have the power under the constitution to say I
am a journalist. And if you’ve got a piece of paper and a pen or access to a tape machine
or access to a video camera and now access to the internet, you are as much a journalist as
anybody else.
Is it even remotely possible for a great journalist like Ted Koppel to be any more humble
than that? This is a man whose competence and standards have reached the ultimate level
of understanding. Clearly, Ted Koppel espouses the awareness that as long as his integrity
survives, he has no competition, and that is what makes Ted Koppel a great journalist.
A final digression: It is fascinating to watch the media fabricate stories out of thin air. The
latest media delusion is that the words mistake and exaggerate are synonymns
-and so, whenever Gore makes an innocent mistake, he is accused of deliberately
exaggerating the situation. Even a former luminary like Bob Woodward, is making a huge
deal over a human tendency that is so common, that if it was applied across the board,
most people do in fact make mistakes/exaggerate. Where does this mass media delusion
that reporters have the right to selectively mangle the meaning of terms for the sake of
targeting a political canidate, come from? We understand the fact that the previous
attempt to label Gore a liar was widely rejected, and if “exaggerate” is the latest effort to
revive failure, the ultimate verdict will be delivered on November 7, 2000. Sorry Ted, this
entire article was supposed to be about you, and it is. You are the inspiration of the effort to be as fair, as impartial and as accurate as possible ---you are the journalist and that is what this is about ---journalism.
This is just to thank Mr. Koppel for his high standards, his integrity and his competence. That's Ted Koppel.
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