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During job search, Ted Koppel sez he listened to al-Jazeera pitch
Ted Koppel acknowledged Friday that he met with a rep from the soon-to-launch English-language al-Jazeera television network before deciding to work for Discovery Channel after he left ABC's "Nightline.""I make it a habit always to listen to people first before I say no," Koppel told The Reporters Who Cover Television at Winter TV Press Tour 2006. "None of your business," Koppel snapped when a reporter asked what al-Jazeera had put on the table. The questions kept coming; Koppel got testier. "Come on!" he said, "I routinely meet with some of the nastiest people in the world. . . . I meet with terrorists, I meet with murderers behind bars." But, of course, not to talk about going to work for them, one reporter noted with, we presume, some degree of accuracy. Koppel said that he was "fascinated" by what the al-Jazeera rep had to say but that he and Bettag did not "entertain the idea for 38 seconds. I know it's fashionable just to look at al-Jazeera as a propaganda outlet for al Qaeda," Koppel said Friday, but "we have been covering the Middle East for many, many years . . . [and] al-Jazeera is a huge step up from where the Arab world's journalism has been over the past 40 years." Koppel said that it "may be possible" that al-Jazeera is "more inclined toward anti-American stories perhaps than American networks are" but that he suspects that will not be true of the new network "if they want to make any progress with their English-language outlet here in the United States." Posted by: Seafarious 2006-01-15 |
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