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themiddle

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  • Over the years, Koppel has made news with occasionally blunt comments delivered off the air. In a 1989 speech at Duke University, Koppel said, “We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: 1,000 voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone’s opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit.” In Koppel’s assessment, “We now communicate with everyone and say absolutely nothing.” He has described his own industry as “the shepherd constantly checking to see which way the sheep are headed; and then racing to overtake the flock so that he can be perceived as its leader. And whatever happens outside or beyond the scrutiny of television simply does not exist.” In a commencement address at Stanford in 1986, Koppel described America as “nation of electronic voyeurs, whose capacity for dialogue is a fading memory, occasionally jolted into reflective life by a one-liner.”

    http://www.nndb.com/people/147/000024075/

  • The first sentence from the link in josh’s post:
    Ted Koppel’s parents were Jewish Germans, escaping the Nazis by emigrating to England, where Koppel was born.

  • Ted: Sorry, I missed the link. RTFA! 🙂

    I *hate* it when media types are so PC that they are afraid to call someone Jewish, resorting to saying “born of Jewish parents”. WTF does that mean? I guess they think of us as a religion, whereas we view ourselves as a tribe/people/nation…

  • No worries, taltman!

    A nugget from http://www.jewishsf.com/ :

    “There’s a persistent false story that Koppel, the son of refugees from Germany, converted to Catholicism. In his autobiography, Koppel explains that his wife is Catholic and for a time they attended a Unitarian church as a compromise. Neither found it satisfactory, he says, and he went back to being a synagogue member and she went to Catholic services.

    Their children, he wrote, were exposed to both faiths. (His daughter, Andrea Koppel, a CNN reporter, married foreign policy expert Kenneth Pollack in a Jewish ceremony.)”

    So maybe his daughter converted, or they’re
    Reform.

    In other Jewish public figure (non-)news, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a Jewish convert to Mormonism (Harry’s also a convert to Mormonism, from mainstream Christianity I assume.)