Peter Jennings

Since I haven’t watched network evening news programs regularly for some years now, it’s been awhile since I’ve thought about how important the presence of Peter Jennings was, especially in those many years I was not in Washington or New York or even Boston, and it was his voice and his personality that tempered and gave good weight to, for example, the depressing horrors of the Reagan decade, when the hopeful areas of American policy and culture were dismembered, and the politics and society that’s dominant today was rearing its young and already ugly head.

Peter Jennings was literate, measured and good natured. How intelligent he actually was mattered less than how intelligent he seemed. He was an advertisement that intelligence might still matter. If we would just join him in weathering the shitstorm.

Apparently he was that calm only on the air. When he watched TV, he screamed at what those idiots are saying just like the rest of us.

It really helped that he was Canadian.

He was one of a kind in what looks like the last generation of real broadcast journalists. First on television would be the Edward R. Murrow generation, trained in radio and on newspapers, reporting before and after and especially during World War II in Europe and Asia. Then younger members of that generation, like Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley, yielded to the next generation: Dan Rather, who was a Dallas reporter during the Kennedy assassination story, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.

Although Jennings had a first run as a young anchor for the barely existing ABC network, he spent many years as an international correspondent before coming back to the big chair at the much bigger network.

He knew more about international affairs than a couple of presidents I could name. If he couldn’t stop the current TV news deterioration and gallop through decadence to irrelevance, he could at least slow it down. His name appeared in this silly little space last week as the only person who insisted on reporting on the genocide in Sudan (according to the Washington Post columnist quoted), and since he’s been absent due to the lung cancer that killed him, that coverage has disappeared.

It's worth pointing out that none of the giants of either Jennings' or Cronkite's or Murrow's generation went to J-school. Now the country is crawling with J-schools, and every tinpot paper on the planet requires a degree from one, and for what? Can they write, can they evaluate, do they know anything or care about anything, what do they learn there?

To add fuel to this fire, Peter Jennings never went to college at all. The insecurity of how he felt about this, together with his great curiosity and immense competitive spirit (if he'd ever gotten into a game of Monopoly or Scrabble with Michael Jordan he might still be alive, because neither of them would leave before they won) made him uniquely suited for excelling at the job for which he had all the other skills and attributes.

An ABC producer appearing on Charlie Rose insisted that Jennings left a legacy in the people he trained. I hope so, just as I dearly hope Bill Moyers has. Unfortunately I don’t see much evidence that anyone with the combination of their standards, skills and power has come along in the next generation.

CBS has gone to someone even older than Rather, NBC has an anchor who so far seems more like the perfect actor to play an anchor, and nobody knows what’s going to happen at ABC.
ABC’s producer said that Jennings wouldn’t let ABC lower its standards too much, and this helped the other networks maintain theirs. If so, now we’ll see what they learned, what they’re really made of. And I guess I do mean we, since I got rid of the cable news stations, and if I ever go to TV for news again (besides PBS, C-Span and especially the Democracy Now! broadcasts carried on our public access channel) I’ll have those three networks to deal with again.

Several guests on the Charlie Rose program said that Peter Jennings was especially happy the last year or so of his life. He was only 67, but he saw and heard more than most of us ever will. He could talk to anyone he wanted (although, someone said, at a party he was more likely to talk to the insecure teenager or the neglected spouse that any of the celebrities who wanted nothing more than to talk to him) , and he did the work he loved. He had a year of newly wedded bliss, and even reconciled as friends with his ex-wife, even after a painful divorce. That's good. Especially for all those years that he was some kind of lifeline to sanity, I salute him.