Review: Revealing notes from Ted Koppel in 'Off Camera'

"Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public"
By Ted Koppel
Alfred A. Knopf
Nonfiction/Memoir
288 pages

In this story: Private life and news of the day A real person RELATED STORIES, SITES

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- On an October day in 1999, three things happened: a grand jury decided to issue no indictments in the case of JonBenet Ramsey, the U.S. Senate voted down a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the Philip Morris Company publicly acknowledged that cigarettes are addictive and a health risk. All three developments were dutifully reported by the news media.

But were they really news?

Ask Ted Koppel.

The long-time anchor of ABC's "Nightline" has an answer in "Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public." The book is a series of journal entries, one for each day during 1999, the last year of the 20th century.

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"At its simplest level," he writes, "it's a 'breadcrumbs in the woods' sort of thing: You don't know where you're going or how it's all going to turn out, and by the time things get really interesting (when you're inside the witch's gingerbread house, for example) it's too late to start figuring it out. This, then, falls into the category of marking the trail of how we got to wherever it is we are at the end of this year."

The trail Koppel marks is remarkably circuitous. It begins in the fevered winter of impeachment, wends through the snow-clogged passes of wartime Kosovo, behind the wire of a women's prison, and onto the campaign trail with presidential wannabes.

Not all of Koppel's observations are about the news of the day. There's quite a lot about his private life, including memories of his youth in England and Germany. We learn about his wife and children, his grandson, their travels and daily travails. He gripes about the phone company and offers some pithy comments about the post office. He describes biking through Ireland with Disney honcho Michael Eisner and sailing the Aegean Sea for his wife's birthday.

Koppel also offers informed observations about the state of broadcast journalism at century's end. He is obviously distressed, and occasionally disturbed, by what he sees.

"My hunch," he confides, "is that before too long CBS News will exist only as a shell organization housing its magazine programs, 60 Minutes and 48 Hours. NBC News long ago went down-market and in the direction of tabloid. ABC News still has the capacity to be a world-class news organization with a global reach, but I'm not sure the corporate will or money is there to make that happen."

The Ted Koppel revealed by his journal entries is crusty, irreverent, thoughtful, humorous -- in short, a real person. He's also quite obviously a news junkie, addicted to newspapers (going so far as to compare the front page stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post) and frequent viewer of CNN, where one of his daughters, Andrea, works. (Editor's note: Reviewer Meagher also works for CNN.)

"CNN employs the 'split screen' as an alternative to editorial judgment," he notes on January 26th. "There is Clinton greeting the Pope. There is [Clinton lawyer] David Kendall making the case against witnesses in the impeachment trial. The Clinton-Pope segment of the picture is larger than the Kendall 'box,' so for the moment we must believe the Pope's visit takes priority."

As for those three developments on a single day in October, Koppel concludes that the JonBenet Ramsey story will be pretty big news, even though it won't have much impact on the sweep of history. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty vote won't make much news, but does have historical significance. And the Philip Morris announcement? It's not really news, he decides, and is hardly historic.

"Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public" offers a rare opportunity to glimpse behind the televised faÁade of a veteran journalist. It allows the reader to understand some of the thought processes Ted Koppel brings to his nightly broadcast.

It also underscores just how good a writer he is. Over the course of his journal entries, Koppel reveals more of himself than he has in twenty years of "Nightline" programs. He emerges as a man who feels and thinks deeply about events in his world and in his life.

Children's Express and the press
August 15, 1996

ABC News: 'Nightline'
Alfred A. Knopf (Random House)

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