Nightline
Nightline is ABC News' late-night television news program broadcast on ABC in the United States with a franchised formula to other networks and stations elsewhere in the world. Created by Roone Arledge, the program featured Ted Koppel as its main anchor from March 1980 until his retirement in November 2005. Its ongoing rotating anchors are Byron Pitts and Juju Chang. Nightline airs weeknights from 12:37 to 1:07 a.m., Eastern Time, after Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which had served as the program's lead-out from 2003 to 2012.
In 2002, Nightline was ranked 23rd on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. The program has won four Peabody Awards, one in 2001, two in 2002 for the reports "Heart of Darkness" and "The Survivors," and one in 2022 for "The Appointment".
Through a video-sharing agreement with the BBC, Nightline repackages some of the BBC's output for an American audience. Segments from Nightline are shown in a condensed form on ABC's overnight news program World News Now. There was also a version of Nightline for sister cable channel Fusion.
History
''The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage'' (1979)
The program began on November 8, 1979, four days after the start of the Iran hostage crisis. ABC News president Roone Arledge figured that the best way to compete against NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was to update Americans on the latest news from Iran. At that time, the show was called The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage: Day "xxx", where xxx represented the number of days that Iranians held the occupants of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran as hostages. At first, World News Tonight lead anchor Frank Reynolds hosted the 20-minute special reports.Shortly after its creation, Reynolds stopped hosting the program. Ted Koppel, then ABC News's State Department Correspondent, took on the hosting duties. A few days later a producer had the idea of displaying the number of days on America Held Hostage.
Ted Koppel's ''Nightline'' (1980–2005)
By the end of the hostage crisis in 1981, the program – which had been retitled the previous year as Nightline – had entrenched itself on ABC's programming schedule, and made Koppel a national figure. ABC had previously used the title "Night Line" for a short-lived 1 a.m. talk show starring Les Crane that was broadcast over the network's New York City flagship station, WABC-TV, starting in 1963.The program originally aired four nights a week until 1982, when the sketch comedy program Fridays was shifted to air after Nightline. By this time, the news program had expanded to 30 minutes. For much of its history, the program prided itself on providing a mix of investigative journalism and extended interviews, which would look out of place on World News Tonight.
The format of the show featured an introduction by the host, then a taped piece on the specific topic of the night; then after a commercial break, there was a live interview related to the topic of the piece. In 1983, ABC attempted to change the program's format to feature multiple topics and expand it to one hour, as opposed to focusing on a single topic in a half-hour. This switch proved to be unsuccessful, and after a few months, the original format of the program was restored. Once the original format returned, reverting to a 31-minute structure, it remained unchanged through the end of Koppel's tenure; it was changed following his retirement.
The program remains unique in American media, considering its nightly broadcasts. Most other similar shows only air once a week, though usually in a prime time slot for a full hour. Nightline is usually less sensationalistic than the weekly news magazines, though the program has caused controversy on occasion.
In 1982, Koppel interviewed Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat on the program, in which he had indicated that he would not accept conditions from the U.S. to recognize the PLO. In 1984, the program featured an interview with Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, marking his first live television appearance. In honor of the 40th Anniversary of D-Day in 1984, Nightline aired a special edition which "covered" the landings on Normandy as though modern television news, along with satellite reports, had existed at the time. The following year in 1985, the program conducted its first on-remote broadcast from South Africa.
In 1986, the program featured interviews with the Philippines' first female president, Corazon Aquino, and outgoing president Ferdinand Marcos, the latter of which tried to defend the extravagant lifestyle of his wife Imelda during the country's economic hardship. In an interview with Nightline in 1987, Colorado Democratic senator and 1988 presidential candidate Gary Hart admitted to having cheated on his wife, Lee Ludwig, with Donna Rice, in the aftermath of an exposé in the Miami Herald that revealed the affair, leading to his withdrawal from the presidential election. That year, Nightline broadcast for the first time in the Soviet Union. In 1988, Nightline conducted a special report on-location from Jerusalem.
In 1996, Times Books published Nightline: History in the Making and the Making of Television, about the program's history up to that point, with author credits attributed to Koppel and Nightline producer Kyle Gibson. The book received numerous lackluster reviews. In Walter Goodman's review of the book for The New York Times, he observed "Ted Koppel announces in his introduction to Nightline that he did none of the interviews that went into the book and that although he 'influenced' and 'contributed' to it, 'in the final analysis Kyle wrote it. Ken Tucker in Entertainment Weekly pointed in an unfavorable manner to the book's use of the third person: "Throughout Nightline the book, the star is referred to in the third person: 'Koppel said' this or that; 'Koppel hadn't been asleep an hour when the phone rang. Frederic M. Biddle of The Boston Globe wrote "This book reminds us not only that good television doesn't necessarily translate into scintillating prose, but that behind every successful journalist lurks a good editor – who in this case didn't show up."
Memorable subjects
During Ted Koppel's tenure as anchor, Nightline devoted each episode to a unique subject. Since its inception, the program has covered many subjects. Many candidates for government offices, such as David Duke, have appeared on Nightline to try to promote themselves. Seeing that there are a large number of prisons in the United States, it created an ongoing series in 1994 called "Crime and Punishment". The program also aired a series of episodes called "America: In Black and White" dealing with individual aspects of American race relations, and another on homosexuality titled "A Matter of Choice?".Over the years, Nightline had a number of technological firsts. The program did the first live report from the base of Mount Everest. In November 1992, science reporter Michael Guillen did the first live broadcast from Antarctica. There were times when a major breaking news story occurred as late as 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time, resulting in the subject of that night's edition being changed in order to cover the story in some form of detail, depending on the depth of information available at the time of broadcast. Examples of this were the deaths of John Lennon and Yasser Arafat.
Nightline also held a series of town hall meetings; these included the Israeli-Palestinian Town Meeting in 1987, one with Nelson Mandela on June 21, 1990, and one discussing the War in Iraq in 2003. The first such "Town Meeting", in 1987, was an extended edition discussing the AIDS epidemic of that period in the U.S. A major portion of the episode was devoted to interviews where important people were asked tough questions on the spot. Another series of town hall meetings featured public discussions and appearances by Japanese officials on the poor performance of American business during the 1980s, contrasted with the success of Japanese businesses. These town hall meetings coincided with the corporate takeovers of U.S. companies by Japanese corporations during the early 1990s.
What had been intended to be a benign episode dedicated to the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier ended up being remembered for one of the show's controversial moments. The April 6, 1987 broadcast included longtime Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis, who had been with the franchise since before Robinson's debut. When Ted Koppel asked Campanis about why there were so few black field managers or general managers in the sport, Campanis responded awkwardly, saying that blacks may lack the "necessities" to succeed in those positions. Despite Koppel offering Campanis numerous chances to clarify or retract his remark, Campanis' subsequent responses only worsened his position. Koppel ultimately scolded Campanis on-air for proposing the "same kind of garbage" that Robinson's critics and skeptics had peddled in 1947. Shortly after the interview, the Dodgers fired Campanis.
Later in 1987, the program broadcast an exclusive interview with televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, following the former's sex scandal that brought down their PTL ministry. On December 3, 1990, Nightline played Madonna's controversial music video "Justify My Love" in its entirety, then interviewed Madonna live about the video's sexual content and censorship. The video contained imagery of sadomasochism, voyeurism and bisexuality. When asked whether she stood to make more money selling the video than airing it on MTV, she shrugged and answered, "Yeah, so? Lucky me." She also mentioned that the banning was hypocritical, as male artists were able to show music videos on the channel which contained sexist and violent imagery. She also mentioned that in her "Vogue" music video she had worn a see-through lace top which exposed her breasts, but this was passed by the channel.
In 1997, Nightline aired "ABC Exclusive" footage of the trial of former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, in violation of a verbal agreement between ABC News and freelance journalist Nate Thayer to use the footage of Pot's trial. Thayer later sued Koppel and ABC News for $30 million in punitive damages and unspecified compensatory damages.