Nightline Daily Email: 7/25
W A S H I N G T O N, July 25 -- The current run in the Doonesbury comic strip is focusing on Vice-President Cheney and his heart problems. That scrutiny of an elected official's health is usually reserved for the President. But as just about everyone knows, Dick Cheney is not your father's vice-president. Long gone are the jokes that the only real function of the vice-president is to attend state funerals. Dick Cheney is universally seen as the most powerful vice-president in history.
This is an interview that we have been trying to arrange for some time. Ted is heading over to the White House, actually the Old Executive Office Building, which is next door, to sit down with Mr.Cheney this afternoon. The starting point for the interview will be energy. Mr.Cheney is the administration's point man on energy. President Bush and he have faced criticism for being perceived as too close to the oil industry, in which they both worked. Now the General Accounting Office is in the middle of a dispute with the White House. They are getting close to filing suit in order to obtain information about who the Vice-President and his task force met with in the course of formulating the energy plan. So far, the White House has resisted the release of that information.
And, as we're told that gas prices are going down, although I sure haven't seen that, it's becoming increasingly difficult to promote a plan calling for increased exploration and drilling. And the administration is under fire by opponents for staying out of the Kyoto agreement on how to combat global warming. And that's just the beginning of the issues that are worth talking about.
Now Nightline has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. Back in the beginning, just doing interviews by satellite was new. Now everyone does it. You have only to look up at the television and there are lots of heads in boxes on interview shows. Now, more often than not, Nightline airs mini-documentaries, or Ted is out in the field. The format is (hopefully) unpredictable. But at its heart, Nightline has always been centered around one thing, the interviewing skills of Ted Koppel. I believe, and not just because I work here, that there's no one better. So tonight, no set-up piece, no fancy graphics, just two men talking to each other.
