How Disney went to war with the news

Even in the cut-throat, high-stakes world of American television the leaked news earlier this week came as a stunner. The ABC TV network is planning to replace its award-winning, late-night news show Nightline, hosted by the revered Ted Koppel, with the irreverent comedy talk show Late Night with David Letterman.

Many saw the planned move as the most dramatic evidence to date that the giant multinational corporations which control the American TV networks plan to do away with serious news in their ever-more intense greed for ratings and profits. It was as if the BBC decided to replace Newsnight with Parkinson. "A body-blow to news in this country," one academic called it.

Since 1996 ABC has been owned by the Walt Disney Company. ABC hopes to poach Letterman, 54, whose contract expires in September, from rival CBS by offering him more than the $30 million he now earns for his five-night-a-week show. ABC is desperate to revamp its schedule. It has seen a disastrous 20 per cent decline in its prime-time ratings in the past year as its powerhouse Who Wants to be a Millionaire has faded.

Letterman would be a great prize. The ascerbic, gap-toothed funny man, whose hour-long show comes on at 11.35pm, the same time as the half-hour Nightline, wins about the same five million audience as the news show. But he hits a far more lucrative demographic, pulling in 50 per cent more viewers under 35 than Nightline. That translates into more than $175 million in advertising revenue annually, and a profit of as much as $60 million for CBS. At the moment ABC makes no money from its late-night shows.

Ted Koppel, blindsided by the news that ABC was planning to dump him, is fighting an intense rearguard action. In an opinion piece in the The New York Times yesterday he defended his show against anonymous sniping from Disney executives.

"It is at best inappropriate and, at worst, malicious to describe what my colleagues and I are doing as lacking relevance," wrote Koppel, 62. But Koppel is resented by Disney execs for running a personal fiefdom, the Principality of Nightline. They note that Nightline's offices have expensive hardwood floors whereas everyone else's are carpeted. And Koppel, they point out, recently renegotiated his contract to earn more than $8 million a year for hosting his half-hour show just three nights a week.

The news anchor surely didn't do his cause any good a few months ago when he publicly humiliated Michael Eisner, his boss and the head of Disney. Defending the importance of the network news division, Koppel asked Eisner at a meeting if he knew the name of an ABC correspondent who had been killed in Bosnia. He didn't, of course.