The last time that Ted Koppel had so much media attention was when Disney, ABC's parent company, was threatening to cancel Nightline to clear the time slot for David Letterman's show. At the time, all of the most credible names in American journalism rallied to Nightline's defense and Disney backed down. Even Letterman supported Nightline.

As one of the highest quality TV news analysis programs on the air, Nightline survived that conflict but today is back in the epicenter of a media storm with the owner of a large group of television stations pre-empting Friday's broadcast of the reading of US Military Personnel killed in Iraq on explicitly political grounds.

In their decision to kill the program, Sinclair Broadcasting Group is accusing Koppel of having a "political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq." Sinclair executives seem to be no strangers to political motives themselves in that the bulk of their political donations this year go to Republicans. (Read the MediaChannel report.)

Many media outlets worldwide are covering the controversy assured that the story will be even bigger. CBS, NPR and a leading newspaper in Japan thus far have called me for comment. My argument is that this represents a media shift towards more independence in coverage in line with recent photos of the caskets of dead US soldiers and a recent 60 Minutes II report on abuses of Iraqis by US soldiers.

It is likely to embolden more critical journalism in the unbrave patriotically correct world of US media.

Criticisms of Koppel on the right are relatively new since his programs are usually carefully balanced and tend to lean to the center. A longtime Washington insider, Koppel has for years been criticized more by the left as being a crony of conservative policy wonks like Henry Kissinger with whom he has admitted socializing for years.

Anti-war activists are questioning Koppel's decision to focus only on the American war dead and not read the names of Iraqi civilians who died in the war without much media attention.

"That would be more of a mini-series, even a telethon," wrote one MediaChannel reader who favors the idea of including under-covered civilian deaths in the reading.

During the Iraq war, Koppel was an embedded journalist reporting from the front lines in a straight-forward manner, rarely if ever criticizing US policy.

After the war, he did sit down for an interview with ex-network correspondent Marvin Kalb of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press Politics and Public Policy where he criticized "live journalism from a war zone" calling it "not good journalism." He has probed the rationale for the Iraq war in interviews with Richard Clarke, the former Bush Administration terrorism-chief-turned-critic who's now an ABC News consultant.

Koppel's reading of the names of the war dead comes on the eve of the anniversary of President Bush's appearance on US aircraft carrier under a carefully placed banner announcing "Mission Accomplished." The program also will be aired on the anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, April 30, l975, when the city of Saigon fell to North Vietnamese and NLF forces.

In many ways the Koppel broadcast resembled a famous Vietnam War edition of LIFE Magazine, which devoted a whole issue in l969 to photos of more than 200 soldiers who died in one week of combat in Vietnam.

That issue signaled a turning point in media coverage of the war. Until then, much of the press was pro-war. After that widely commented upon issue, more anti-war coverage appeared.

Nightline, which is known for covering the news is now making it. It is a comment on the times that Koppel had to position his broadcast as a tribute to US soldiers in hopes of forestalling attacks on the right. Those attacks are coming anyway from inside the media.

-- Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org's executive editor, is author of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception" a book on the media coverage of the war. Schechter is now making a film dissecting the subject.

© MediaChannel.org, 2004.

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