Peter Jennings Files Last Report

Peter Jennings lost his battle with lung cancer last night. At the age of 67, he was in many ways still a young man, and in the world of journalism, he had begun the long slow slide from top form to merely exceptional – a journey made by Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner and John Chancellor a generation before him. What is truly depressing about his passing, in addition to the loss of an incredibly urbane human being, is the fact that there seems to be no one about whom the same will be said a generation from now.

Mr. Jennings, a Canadian by birth (indeed, he hosted “Peter’s People” for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation when he was 9 – his dad was the CBC’s first voice, which may have gotten him the job), carried some of the finer traits of his native land with him wherever he went. He was modest without much reason to be, and he was quiet in manner, which as few of his competitors these days understand, gave him a gravitas far beyond his years at the start of his career. He was credible in a business where that is everything.

Not that his career was one smooth ride up the express elevator to success. At the age of 26, he was the anchorman for the third-place and third-rate ABC Evening News in 1965 having joined the company in 1964. In 1968, he told his bosses he needed more experience and went to Beirut (then a beautiful city of elegance and charm on the Mediterranean rather than the war-torn disaster it has become), and he established the first US foreign desk in the Arab world. It is hard to imagine anyone in TV news these days saying they weren’t ready to anchor a broadcast, let alone leaving the country to cover foreign affairs.

Naturally, in a career spanning from the 1960s to the first decade of the third millennium, some reports stand out more than others. His work in 1986 on the Challenger disaster was accurate and sensitive without devolving into voyeuristic. The Fall of the Berlin Wall offered Mr. Jennings the chance to show his knowledge of the world and what the event meant. And his broadcast day on September 11, 2001, ended on September 13. It was that event, perhaps, that finally had him take out US citizenship – watching one’s adopted home town burn has that sort of effect.

Despite not finishing high school, Mr. Jennings was, without a doubt, one of the smartest people one is likely ever to meet. And beyond that, he wanted to do the job of reporter rather than the job of talking head reading the autocue. John Simpson of the BBC, who worked with Mr. Jennings, wrote of an episode that summed up his friend and colleague. He was watching ABC report on something in the former Soviet Union when the transmitter went down. Rather than say there were technical difficulties and move onto the next story, Mr. Jennings “apologised [sic, Englishman talking] and then told us quickly and clearly what the correspondent's report was going on to say.” Where in the vast wasteland of TV news is there anyone who could do that now?


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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