'Nightline' will again read names of war dead
Knight Ridder News Service
ABC News' "Nightline," which sparked controversy last year with a broadcast reading the names of U.S. military people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, plans to do so again tonight.
The late-night newscast's Memorial Day broadcast will be devoted entirely to reading the names and showing photos of the 900-plus service members who died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past year.
Koppel
The show, titled "The Fallen," will be extended from 30 to roughly 45 minutes to allow all the names to be read.
"Just as it was a year ago, 'The Fallen' is about the men and women who have died in our names in Iraq and Afghanistan," "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel says. "We owe it to these men and women who have died in the cause of freedom that we remember them with honor."
The announcement of "The Fallen" this year has thus far not brought the controversy it did last year, when Sinclair Broadcast Group — the largest owner of TV stations in the country known for its rightward lean — ordered its eight ABC affiliates not to air the broadcast.
At the time, a Sinclair spokesman said the "Nightline" tribute "appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."
This year, though, Sinclair is all for the broadcast, apparently because it's airing on Memorial Day and not during May sweeps, which was the case a year ago.
The company also said last year that reading the names of the dead focuses solely on the cost of war, rather than its benefits; those concerns didn't come up this time.
As is often the case with these things, the controversy over "The Fallen" last year boosted "Nightline's" ratings by quite a bit — it drew about 30 percent more viewers than the show's other installments that week.
