Howard Kurtz recently interviewed former President Jimmy Carter on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Unless there is some significant portion of the interviewing missing from the video, it has to do down as one of the most glaring oversights in the history of media navel gazing, or perhaps it was an intended slap at ABC.
“I came in at a time when the press was in the post-Watergate period, and when two reporters in ‘The Washington Post’ had become famous because they had revealed some secrets that had brought down the Nixon administration. And when I got there, shortly thereafter, I think a lot of the reporters were looking for something within my administration that might be scandalous or put them in the headlines as very notable investigative reporters.”
It’s incomprehensible to me that a serious media analyst could re-visit the Carter years media-wise and never once mention the man and network that launched a show that went on to span three decades after bringing down the Carter administration almost single-handedly.
Softball interview, or network snub? Discuss. We’ll update if Reliable Source’s Howard Kurtz fills us in.
Nightline debuted March 24, 1980, with Koppel at the helm — but only, he says, after both Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw declined offers to anchor the new program. Koppel, of course, became synonymous with Nightline, anchoring until his retirement from the program in 2005. Ted Koppel talks with TVNewser thirty years after it all began.
TVNewser: What was the impact of the program during the hostage crisis?
Koppel: Arguably, not the program, but the event — which was clearly magnified by the program — I think the event cost Jimmy Carter the [presidential] election [of 1980]…
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