Koppel!

Beginning with the Iranian hostage crisis in the late 1970s, ABC News' Ted Koppel appeared on America's televisions nightly with a summary of the days news events and some in-depth reporting on different issues. Mostly the episodes of the show, which came to be called Nightline, focused on a single issue or story. When Koppel retired in 2005, ABC kept the show but switched to a multi-host format. Nightline is still unique in television news programming in this respect: Similar shows usually air weekly and late-night programming is thought to be the domain of the smarmy and pretentious talk show.

In any event, Koppel recently appeared on The Kalb Report, a monthly show at the National Press Club hosted by Martin Kalb. He offered some opinions on several topics, suggesting that the national media treated the women who accused recently sworn-in Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault much differently than they did some of the women who leveled the same charges against then-President Bill Clinton.

His most interesting exchange came with CNN's Brian Stelter, in which Koppel said that Stelter's network as well as MSNBC enjoy higher ratings today because of their wall-to-wall coverage of President Donald Trump. “Is there a moment of the day when they are not focusing on Donald Trump or some intimately related subject?" Koppel asked. Stelter hmphed but not very loudly, since it wouldn't be hard to set a timer on a broadcasting day at CNN and find that the Trump minutes vastly outnumber everything else. Koppel suggested that an event such as the devastating Typhoon Mangkhut would get airtime if the death total hit four figures, which may or may not have been a little too much on the mean side.

In any event, Koppel points out that networks which lament the damage they say President Trump is doing to the nation were more than happy to cover his antics before he was elected and the coverage drew eyeballs to their shows. The recently disgraced and resigned Les Moonves of CBS said the same in February of 2016. When the people who eyed the ratings jumps as they snickered off-camera at the antics of candidate Trump complain about those same antics now staged from the White House by President Trump, I think of the old scorpion and frog tale. The scorpion talks the frog into swimming them across the river, promising he will not sting the frog if the frog carries him across, since they would both drown Midway through the crossing, the scorpion stings the frog and as the dying frog begins to sink he says, "Why? You said you wouldn't sting me because we'd both drown, and now we'll both be dead!"

"You knew what I was when you picked me up," says the scorpion.

Donald Trump was a reality-TV show host before he was a candidate for office. So TV people especially should have known what he was and avoided "picking him up." Now they're stuck with him and as much as I dislike the guy, I don't feel one bit of sorry. Doesn't sound like Koppel is, either.