UMass graduation speaker Ted Koppel addresses future of journalism

News icon Ted Koppel says social media like Twitter and Facebook may have played a role in the Arab Spring that brought down despotic governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and elsewhere.

But he worries they are also bringing down the quality of journalism.

"If we ignore all the serious issues or try to reduce them all to 140 characters or fewer exchanges, we are going to have ... genuine problems, not just in the economy, but in foreign policy, education, health," he said. "They all require more than the quick exchanges in our social media. They really require some good journalism and good in-depth journalism."

Koppel, a 41-time Emmy winner, will deliver the commencement address Friday to 5,000 undergraduates at McGuirk Stadium at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in ceremonies that begin at 4 p.m.

Koppel worked at ABC News for 42 years. He said his commencement speech will address his concerns about a media culture that now places increasing emphasis on quick-hit news.

"We're so thrilled with the notion that we can reach each other at all times, within a millisecond, no matter where the other person is, that we are paying less and less attention to the content," Koppel said. "Media is far less important than what the media carries."

In a 30-minute telephone interview with the Gazette from the Boston hotel where he was staying last week, Koppel covered a range of issues that he said are plaguing journalism. He said he is discouraged about the future of the profession.

Where lengthy investigations were once prized, speed is now emphasized, he said. Accuracy and concern for facts have been replaced by bias, carefully packaged to build an audience.

The declining fortunes of the country's major media organizations can largely be attributed to a business model that hasn't kept up with technological advancements, Koppel said, noting that newspapers, radio and television have all suffered in the Internet age.

"When was the last time you have seen a one-hour special on television?" the longtime host of ABC's "Nightline" asked. "I can tell you the last one I saw. It was on Charlie Sheen. When they do specials now it is on something trivial and almost obscene. To devote an hour to the struggles of a Hollywood actor when there are so many issues that really scream for attention really is obscene."

He focused the majority of his comments on television.

"It was easy for ABC, NBC and CBS to commit themselves to good news coverage back in the day when there were only three networks and when the networks made so much money on their entertainment programs," Koppel said. "They could afford to be generous about underwriting their news divisions."

Cable television and the Internet have not greatly expanded the pool of news consumers, he said. Instead, they have left media organizations competing for thinner and thinner pieces of the pie. And that has produced an incentive to cater to peoples' biases and give them what they want rather than what they need, he said.

"We have Fox on the right, MSNBC on the left. They are giving people the news that resonates with their existing biases and that's not really what the news business ought to be," Koppel said.

The impact of a polarized media is evident in the country's politics, he said.

"I think the partisan nature of some media, and the vapidness of most of the rest of the media, puts politicians in the position where it's very, very difficult to do what politicians need to do in a republic," Koppel said. "And that is to find common ground, compromise, move toward the other side a little bit. That is harder to do in this climate."

Koppel expressed a sliver of hope that in-depth journalism will regain a place in the media world. For 25 years, viewers of "Nightline" proved that there is demand for serious journalism, he said.

He described National Public Radio, The New York Times and the television programs "60 Minutes" and "Frontline" as standard bearers in their respective fields. But they are increasingly isolated, he said.

Koppel said he objects to the trend of media organizations doing news "lightly" all the time because of the 24-hour demand for it. He blames news outlets for not giving reporters enough time to cover issues comprehensively, to the detriment of journalism.

"It takes time to gather news," Koppel said. "It takes time to get into a culture, a society, to find where the bodies are buried and find out what makes a society tick."

Koppel, who made his name reporting on the Vietnam War, said this problem is especially evident in foreign affairs reporting. He said that ABC had 30 foreign correspondents in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, broadcast networks generally have four or five foreign correspondents worldwide, he said.

"It is a very complex place out there," Koppel said. "The way you cover the world is not by parachuting anchors in when war breaks out. The way you cover the world is having people on the ground who tell you six months before the war breaks out that things are getting very dangerous.

"Foreign correspondents," he added, "should be out there as an early warning system, not the people who come in and scoop up after the ambulance."

Koppel said the three years he spent covering the Vietnam War were the most formative of his career.

"That was really where I learned my trade," he said. "If you follow the crowd you're always going to be late. Go out and find your own story. There are plenty."