Remembering...

Peter Jennings: 1938-2005

How many six-year-olds could say that they sat down during dinnertime to watch prime time news? Probably not many but I could. To a child of that age, the act of turning on the news to learn of the day’s top stories seems so adult, a grown-up thing. For me, the news served as a transition from afternoon cartoons to much more serious global topics.

The report of Peter Jennings finally succumbing to lung cancer that I caught late Sunday night had an effect on me. As the lead anchor on ABC’s World News Tonight, Jennings was the face and voice I sat in front of at the dinner table for many years of my youth. With two working parents, I was often under the care of my great-grandparents. Living in the same two-story apartment all I had to do was grab my blanket and walk up the stairwell to be with them. As they passed on before I entered grammar school, my mother’s parents were given the responsibility to baby-sit me until my parents’ time at work was done. My grandparents took on extra duties once my younger brother started attending the same grammar school as I. Be it summer days or school days there was always a routine to our day at their home. Naps were few and far between. We were young; we weren’t supposed to be tired. What was a constant was dinner. Around 5 P.M. my grandmother would start to prepare dinner for my grandfather who generally came home from work at the steel mill at 5:30 P.M. or so. By six o’clock, my grandfather would take control of the remote control and turn on the news. This majestic music would pour out of the television followed by a smooth greeting from the anchorman. Next to my grandfather, Peter Jennings was the only other person who could command the dinner table’s attention. Just as my brother and I weren’t allowed to complain of any sort of fatigue at our age we weren’t allowed to interrupt my grandfather’s focus on the news.

In a way, I think my grandfather was trying to make me an informed person regardless of how old I was. He could have easily treated me as a child, but, instead, he treated me like an adult; expecting me to behave in a respectful manner and opening my eyes to what was going on in the world around me. From U.S. politics to international tugs of war, economical debates to interest stories, the Canadian-born Jennings was the window to worlds within worlds. He gave the news a level of sophistication that was pure. If Jennings was reporting it, then it was something I needed to know about. His voice flowed with ease. His very stature on the news set breathed of professionalism.

During the course of my life, twenty-four years, Jennings had served as the lead anchor of World News Tonight for twenty-two years. It always amazes me when I think of the years of service people place into their particular profession. As I’ve watched the various media tributes to Jennings, from Larry King to Ted Koppel, I’ve been reminded why I enjoyed watching Jennings in the first place. Most importantly, I’m reminded of the news era that I’ve lived through. Jennings' death has brought the retirement of Dan Rather at CBS Evening News and Tom Brokaw at NBC Nightly News into a much sharper light to me. News has changed. This very web blog is evidence enough of how people get their news. Television news, like radio, is almost a dinosaur in an era of cable news and the Internet. Journalists have taken the back seat to political pundits and radio talk show hosts that use the television medium as an extension of their agendas. A person’s politics now plays more of a role in the type of news that is being reported—liberal media versus conservative media, the Left versus the Right. Shouting matches have been dressed up as journalism.

Objectivity never looked more graceful than with Peter Jennings. He had the looks of Roger Moore’s James Bond character, something I had never thought of before it was mentioned. The words he spoke danced with elegance and intelligence. The gravity of the news directed how he would handle its delivery. The story came first. If there’s anything that I as a young journalist can take from Jennings and what I saw in him every evening, it is that the measure of quality means more in journalism than vanity. The spotlight could never diminish the quiet dignity Jennings displayed behind the ABC desk. He never forgot that he was performing the duties of a journalist and not a television news anchor. He worked to serve the public and not conglomerates. He asked rather than demanded for our attention; as an audience, we paid him with our trust, a commodity vital to any journalist. He didn’t have to tell the audience that he was looking out for them or that he strove to make sure each story he reported was fair and balanced. His work spoke louder for itself than he could possibly imagine. For all the charm and flare he brought to journalism, Peter Jennings strove to push his abilities to their limits in order to give the best news the public could receive. In the eyes of Jennings, the bar of journalistic excellence could never be allowed to look down, it had to keep looking beyond each horizon it approached. He did his best to ask the tough questions, and he tried as hard as he could to make sense of a world that didn’t always have the most transparent answers. To inform and to educate—they are the two pillars of journalism that often get lost among today’s news media, but, in the hands of Jennings, were always handled with care and respect.

Peter Jennings was 67 years old.