Koppel to leave 'Nightline' and ABC News

Ted Koppel, the cerebral network journalist who transformed the Iranian hostage crisis into a launching pad for one of television's signature news programs, announced yesterday that he will step down as ''Nightline" anchor in December.

ABC News president David Westin said in an e-mail that Koppel had advised him of plans to leave the network when his contract expires Dec. 4. ''For 25 years Ted Koppel and Nightline have represented the best of what we can achieve in reporting on the important and difficult issues of our day -- all done with the utmost intelligence and integrity," the e-mail stated.

The fate of the program -- which has suffered from falling ratings and the perception that it has lost relevance and impact -- has been the subject of considerable speculation in recent years. In what proved to be a major embarrassment for the network, David Letterman rejected ABC's widely publicized offer to move his late night talk show into the ''Nightline" slot back in 2002.

When asked about the network's plans, ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said: ''By definition, 'Nightline' without Ted Koppel will be a very different broadcast. We're confident we'll continue to put on a broadcast at 11:35 that loyal 'Nightline' viewers will recognize and ABC will be proud of."

''Nightline" executive producer Tom Bettag, who is also departing with Koppel, said in an interview that the two men were looking for new opportunities, but were not sure what they would do. ''We're going to take a flier here . . . and do something really bold and different and distinctive at this point in our career," Bettag said. ''And we don't know what it is."

With the announcement of his impending exit, the 65-year-old Koppel becomes the third major network news star -- after NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and his CBS counterpart Dan Rather -- to recently step away from his high-powered post. A 42-year ABC News veteran, Koppel had been chief diplomatic correspondent when, in March 1980, he began anchoring a groundbreaking late-night news show that grew out of the network's coverage of the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Iran. As he took the program to hot spots from South Africa to Israel, Koppel gained a reputation for delivering the kind of sophisticated, in-depth coverage that could not be found elsewhere on television.

''I think Ted will be honored among television journalists for a long time to come as someone who was both serious and successful," said Bob Zelnick, a former ABC correspondent who is chairman of Boston University's journalism department. But he characterized news of Koppel's departure as ''a quiet passing, and it should be, because the best days of 'Nightline' were long ago."

In recent years, as Koppel has reduced his schedule, the ratings have slumped significantly from about 6.4 million viewers in 1993 to their current level of about 3.7 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research ''Nightline" did create a major political controversy last year when it devoted a program to reciting the roster of Americans killed in Iraq. Koppel defended that move by saying ''I'm opposed to sustaining the illusion that war can be waged by the sacrifice of a few without burdening the rest of us in any way." But most of the news about ''Nightline" lately has involved rumors that ABC was looking for a way to re-invent the show, perhaps to appeal to younger viewers.

''They showed their hand in 2002 with this Letterman thing," says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television. ''The other big variable here they've got to be looking at is the success of Jon Stewart over at Comedy Central -- the one model [that] you can actually do public affairs and news programming and actually get a younger audience."