Ted Koppel
Ted Koppel, a 35-year veteran of ABCNEWS, was named anchor of Nightline when the broadcast was introduced in March 1980. In his anchor role, Koppel is the principal on-air reporter and interviewer for television’s first late-night network news program. In addition, Koppel is the program’s managing editor.
Koppel has won every major broadcasting award, including 30 Emmy Awards, six George Foster Peabody Awards, nine duPont-Columbia Awards, nine Overseas Press Club Awards, two George Polk Awards, and two Sigma Delta Chi Awards, the highest honor bestowed for public service by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Before his Nightline assignment, Koppel worked as an anchor, foreign and domestic correspondent and bureau chief for ABCNEWS.
From 1971 to 1980, he was ABCNEWS’ Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, and for a two-year period beginning in 1975, he anchored The ABC Saturday Night News. His diplomatic assignment included coverage of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a tour of duty that took Koppel more than a quarter of a million miles during the days of Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy.”
During the time he was on the State Department beat, Koppel co-wrote the best seller In the National Interest, with his friend and colleague Marvin Kalb, formerly of CBS News.
Before being named Diplomatic Correspondent, Koppel was ABCNEWS’ Hong Kong Bureau Chief from 1969 to 1971. In this position, he traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to cover stories from Vietnam to Australia.
In 1968, he became Miami Bureau Chief for ABCNEWS, where his assignments included covering Latin America.
On the political beat, he has had a major reporting role in every presidential nominating convention — a total of 16 — since 1964. He co-anchored ABCNEWS’ coverage of the 1980 Democratic and Republican National Conventions and ABCNEWS’ election night coverage.
Koppel joined ABCNEWS New York in 1963 at the age of 23 as a full-time general assignment correspondent. Prior to joining ABCNEWS, he worked at WMCA Radio in New York City, where he was a desk assistant and an occasional off-air reporter.
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