Ted Koppel

Ted Koppel (born February 8, 1940, Lancashire, England) is a British-born American journalist and news broadcaster who is best known for his 25-year career as the anchor of the popular late-night television news program Nightline. The show’s enduring success was often attributed to Koppel’s no-nonsense approach to investigative journalism. Using unscripted questions and a direct interviewing style, Koppel tackled a range of thought-provoking issues of national and international importance. He also served as Nightline’s managing editor.

Koppel was an only child of German-Jewish parents who emigrated to England in the 1930s to escape Nazism. While in Germany, Koppel’s father was the owner of one of the country’s largest tire factories. When Koppel was 13 years old, he and his family moved from England to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen 10 years later. After graduating from a private preparatory school in New York City Koppel attended Syracuse University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1960, and Stanford University, earning a master’s degree in mass communications research and political science in 1962. At Stanford Koppel met his future wife, Grace Anne Dorney, who also received a master’s degree in communications research.

Koppel first joined the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in 1963 as a radio news correspondent. Beginning with the presidential election of 1964, Koppel regularly reported on presidential campaigns and major-party conventions. Two years later he transitioned from radio to television as ABC’s war correspondent in South Vietnam (see Vietnam War). He became the network’s bureau chief in Miami in 1968 and in Hong Kong in 1969.

Koppel served as ABC’s chief diplomatic correspondent from 1971 to 1980, during which time he reported on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East. (Koppel took a brief leave of absence in the mid-1970s to care for his children while his wife attended law school at Georgetown University.) From late 1979, at the start of the Iran hostage crisis—in which militants in Iran seized 66 American citizens at the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and held 52 of them hostage for more than a year—Koppel frequently anchored a dedicated nightly news update entitled The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage. In 1980 The Iran Crisis evolved into Nightline, a half-hour late-night news program with Koppel as its permanent anchor. Nightline featured investigative journalism, in-depth and extended coverage of current events, and interviews with significant public figures.

During Koppel’s tenure, Nightline dedicated most episodes to a single topic. Although the subject of one episode could differ significantly from another, typical fare included politics, economics, science, and breaking news. Year after year, Nightline delivered high-quality news coverage, including poignant and exclusive interviews with famous individuals such as Warren E. Burger, the 15th chief justice (1969–86) of the United States Supreme Court, and onetime Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat.

The program and its staff, led by Koppel, earned numerous major honors in broadcast journalism. By the time he retired from Nightline and ABC in 2005, Koppel himself had won several dozen prestigious awards, including 8 Peabody Awards for outstanding public service in electronic media and more than 40 Emmy Awards. In 2001 Koppel was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters’ Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

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After retiring from Nightline, Koppel worked in a variety of news-related media, including as a contributing columnist for The New York Times, a producer of documentaries for the Discovery Channel, a commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), and a contributing analyst on newscasts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Koppel is the author of The New York Times bestseller Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (2015), an account of the extreme vulnerability of America’s power grid to terrorist cyberattacks. Other popular written works by Koppel include Nightline: History in the Making and the Making of Television (with Kyle Gibson, 1996) and Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public (2000), a memoir of the final year of the 20th century.