Nightline

The president of ABC has affirmed his network's commitment to continuing the two-decade run of Nightline, a month after his pursuit of talk show host David Letterman put the show's future in doubt. Robert Iger, ABC president, declared his stand in an e-mail sent to ABC News employees yesterday. While he indirectly acknowledged the efforts by ABC and Disney, its corporate parent, to recruit Letterman from CBS, Iger yesterday called Nightline "one of the network's signature programs." "The Walt Disney Company and ABC have always valued Nightline for the important role it plays for the network and in the national discourse," Iger wrote.

BET has a mixed history when it comes to news, documentaries and public affairs - and much of it is for the worse. With a former programming emphasis on music videos and a record of little or no serious commitment to news, questions have regularly been raised whether Black Entertainment Television was serving its audience or exploiting it. The paucity of serious news and first-rate public affairs programs was impossible not to notice. The National Association of Black Journalists gave BET its "Thumbs Down Award" in 2007.

Don Cheadle, the Oscar-nominated star of Hotel Rwanda, will serve as a "special correspondent" for tonight's Nightline as he reports on the ethnic conflict in the Sudan. Cheadle and Nightline producer Rick Wilkinson recently joined several members of Congress on a fact-finding mission to the country's Darfur region. Rebel groups in the region accuse the Sudanese government of financing Arab militias called Janjaweed to wipe out non-Arab enclaves, a charge the government denies. Thousands of people have died in the fighting over the past two years; nearly 2 million are in refugee camps.

You have to admit late-night TV has become a lot more interesting in the past two weeks, since Jay Leno, who consistently dominated the competition, left for prime time. Two weeks ago all eyes were on Conan O'Brien, who struggled in his much-hyped opening nights to find the right voice - especially when it came to the monologue, his great and glaring weakness. Last week, David Letterman was all the buzz with crude jokes about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's daughters - and Palin's angry response that stopped just short of labeling him a sexual "pervert" - her word, not mine.

On screen, Eric Stanley, a freshly scrubbed kid with closely cropped hair, fights fiercely for his high school baseball team. But, as he tells it, his greatest battles occur off the field. "I first felt called to preach when I was 14 years old," Stanley says on the first of a two-part Nightline series beginning tonight on ABC stations. "And I really contemplated whether that's what God wanted me to do because I was so scared to get in front of public groups." Now 18, Stanley lives in Odessa, Mo., and is one of three young evangelical Christian ministers featured in the program.

He has the highest ratings in late-night television, he's interviewed everybody who's anybody, and his contract guarantees, among other things, that he never has to work another Monday.CBS' David Letterman, right? Everybody knows he's the king of late night.While the conventional wisdom does, indeed, say that Letterman rules late night, the A.C. Nielsen ratings say the most popular show is actually ABC's "Nightline." Host Ted Koppel is television's premier interviewer -- Mr. Must-See-at-Bedtime for members of the political establishment, and the host with the same kind of sweetheart contract Johnny Carson had before his retirement in 1992 after 30 years at NBC.As "Nightline" approaches its 15th anniversary on March 5, comparing Koppel to the legendary Carson seems far more appropriate than Koppel and Letterman.

"Nightline: History in the Making and the Making of Television," by Ted Koppel and Kyle Gibson. Times Book. 479 pages. $26Once upon a time, before everybody started staying up way too late, the stretch after the last local newscast was a sleepy little hamlet populated by performing poodles, "Baretta" reruns and a benevolent deity named Johnny Carson. If you were on another network you didn't even bother mounting serious competition; this, the execs said, was "Carson time."But for one scrappy ABC producer, the hour "opposite" Johnny was like a scrabbly vacant lot that could be had cheap.

FRIDAY'S Nightline -- the one Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group goofily denounced as "motivated by a political agenda to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq" and refused to air on its ABC-affiliated television stations -- was titled, "The Fallen," and somewhere Paul Fussell must have been amused. To Fussell -- professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, skilled curmudgeon, connoisseur of irony, grand essayist on matters of war and culture -- anything in modern media called "The Fallen" would hark back to a bygone age of high diction and reality-masking euphemisms, and essentially would glorify war. In Fussell's seminal work, The Great War and Modern Memory, he presents a list of the noble and poetic language that once lived in Europe and supposedly died in the mustard clouds of World War I -- danger was "peril," the enemy "the foe," to die was "to perish," and the dead were "the fallen."

Ted Koppel and the gang from "Nightline" (11: 35 p.m.-12: 05 a.m., WMAR, Channel 2) profile Eric Davis, whose remarkable recovery from cancer surgery has turned him into a source of inspiration for cancer patients everywhere. Included will be an interview with Davis, taped shortly after the Orioles defeated Seattle in the Division Series.Pub Date: 10/10/97

While most of the attention surrounding late-night network television in the last 18 months has centered on the showdown between David Letterman on CBS and Jay Leno on NBC, a 15-year-old ABC News program, "Nightline," has experienced a surge in growth that has put it in the strongest competitive position in its history.More viewers than ever are watching network television in the late-night hours, largely because of the addition of Mr. Letterman and his hit "Late Show" on CBS. Mr. Letterman moved immediately to the top of the late-night ratings when he switched from NBC in 1993.

NEW YORK -- For James Goldston, executive producer of Nightline, the prospect of a prolonged writers' strike that paralyzes much of the television industry offers an awkward upside. The longer a work stoppage keeps The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Show with David Letterman in repeats, the better shot the ABC late-night newsmagazine -- which remains on the air live -- has at drawing more viewers. Indeed, Nightline, which introduced a new anchor team two years ago, has already enjoyed an immediate lift.

Nightline-without-Ted Koppel debuted in the wee hours Tuesday morning after ABC Monday Night Football and late local news. It was probably a good thing that many viewers had presumably already gone to bed. It was a smooth launch with no major glitches or serious mistakes. Give James Goldston, the new executive producer, credit for delivering a polished-looking production. But there is polished, and there is excessively slick. In trying to energize the broadcast through the use of flashing lights, banks of video monitors, quick camera cuts and a backdrop of Times Square, Goldston has created a garish-looking TV creature more reminiscent of the carnival midway than the pioneering broadcast whose name it bears.

The affiliates didn't want his show, and his network bosses didn't want him to anchor it. Ultimately, they made it all too clear that he was a "last-ditch" choice with what he calls a "fairly insulting" salary offer after they couldn't get CBS anchorman Dan Rather or NBC's Tom Brokaw. That was the not-so-promising beginning 26 years ago of Ted Koppel's career at the anchor desk of ABC News' Nightline -- a critically acclaimed tenure that comes to an end tonight. The creation of pioneering TV producer Roone Arledge, Nightline is one of the few network news innovations of the past 30 years that has provided public service and prestige as well as profits.

R.I.P. Nightline? ABC news announced yesterday that the show's host, Ted Koppel, will be replaced with a team of three co-anchors in an adjusted format. Starting Nov. 28, the nightly news show will be hosted by three journalists affiliated with ABC: Martin Bashir, Terry Moran and Cynthia McFadden. While Nightline will retain the name that has made it a hallmark for serious, high-minded broadcast journalism, there are indications that the award-winning format is about to change significantly.

THE RUSSIAN government says it will kick ABC-TV out of the country because Nightline had the effrontery to show an interview with a Chechen rebel leader named Shamil Basayev, who has been behind some of the bloodiest and most humiliating episodes in Russia's war to retain the breakaway republic. And until the network's staff people can get their bags packed, Moscow has ordered all Russian officials to refuse to speak to them. Has Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. signed on as a Kremlin adviser in his spare time?

Ted Koppel, who as anchor of ABC's Nightline for a quarter-century offered perspective on the day's events to millions of Americans as they headed off to bed, will leave the network when his contract expires at year's end, ABC announced yesterday. The 65-year-old newsman's departure - and that of his longtime producer Tom Bettag - from ABC is part of sweeping changes in recent months at all three major networks, including anchorman Tom Brokaw's retirement from NBC and Dan Rather's resignation as CBS anchorman.

Whether the goal of an NFL franchise is worth the price to state and city governments was debated before a national television audience early today, with a football-hungry Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke among the participants and a local naysayer bumped from the lineup.Speaking on the ABC show "Nightline," Mr. Schmoke said ... ... TC football team is part of the "glue" holding a community together. "You have to have a balance. You have to have many things to make a livable community," he said, particularly for a city that had its team "snatched away."

NEW YORK -- The possibility that Nightline, ABC's long-running public affairs show, may be in trouble is only the latest, if not the most vivid, indication that broadcast news is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Before the threat to Nightline surfaced last week, Americans already had witnessed the convergence of news and entertainment as the major television networks moved to soften their content and hire popular performers as anchors in order to attract a younger, more desirable audience.

Don Cheadle, the Oscar-nominated star of Hotel Rwanda, will serve as a "special correspondent" for tonight's Nightline as he reports on the ethnic conflict in the Sudan. Cheadle and Nightline producer Rick Wilkinson recently joined several members of Congress on a fact-finding mission to the country's Darfur region. Rebel groups in the region accuse the Sudanese government of financing Arab militias called Janjaweed to wipe out non-Arab enclaves, a charge the government denies. Thousands of people have died in the fighting over the past two years; nearly 2 million are in refugee camps.

In a time when the lines between partisan politics and the media are often blurred, nothing has been more provocative than Sinclair Broadcasting Group's decision to air a program featuring allegations that Sen. John Kerry's anti-war activism contributed to the torture of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam. Sinclair was forced to alter its controversial plan last week after intense pressure from advertisers and investors, who appeared to understand the importance of separating news from advocacy better than the company's executives.