I recently stayed up to watch ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel. I'm normally not a fan of his, but the topic interested me and I wanted to listen to one of his guests, Jesse Jackson.
Well, it didn't take Ted long to don his badger suit, treating his guests as if they were recalcitrant schoolboys, cutting them off so commercials about pain relievers could have equal time. At times his peremptory schoolmarmish snotty manner so turned me off that I almost turned the show off. As the final credits rolled, a name occurred to me for what had happened: Koppelization.
It's actually an old threat, and I'm certainly not the first to talk about it. Koppelization is the tendency of the media, most notably television, to decide for us what is important, what passes muster as information we need and should have. It's an imperious stance, First World news producers half-feeding an audience it considers an underdeveloped Third World. But what made this especially offensive was the way Koppel not only interrupted these people but said, by his actions and commentary, that his, Koppel's, agenda of questions was more important than any statements to be made by is Jackson - as if we'd tuned in to drink at Koppel's well and not to eat with his guests.
We've seen throughout the heavy bumper-car ride of the primaries the kinds of problems television causes. Its presence demands that the candidates play to it, the candidates feel they need it, and television's taste for profits demands that the candidates play to it in ways that television can sell. This is what Koppelization does: it interposes the medium between the candidates and the voters, making the medium more important than either. Because this happens we get "sound bites," photo opportunities, news briefs, and a Suffolk Downs approach to politics - but nothing as substantial as knowledge, insight, or explanation.
This is not an indictment of all television news people - there are some paladins out there: Sam Donaldson, McNeil/Lehrer, Peter Jennings (when he's not doing work for ABC). But despite the presence of solid people, Koppelization has to be stopped. How? At least in terms of the primaries, there's a very easy way to do it. Restrict the elections to eight weeks and make television give free air time to all candidates. Candidates, released from having to raise money for costly television campaigns, can focus on meeting people, and this will help remove some of the monetary corruption of our political process. And we won't bombarded for years with the wooly maunderings of media pundits about who has what advantage over whom. Without Ted Koppel, we may be able to figure out what's going on.
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