Ropes of Sand

For a Thousand Reasons, A Few Words About Peter Jennings

I'd put another version of this up on the Barrelhouse blog, but I thought I would put it here, too. ABC is broadcasting a two-hour retrospective of Peter Jennings' life tonight at 8 and for me, it will be must see television.

It might be hard for those of you who've grown up with a plethora of entertainment choices on television to realize that for the bulk of television's history, most Americans got their news from the triumvirate of Jennings, Brokaw and Rather. Too many people think that Shepard Smith is a newsman, that Fox is actually Fair and Balanced, or that the media is part of a liberal conspiracy. Too many people believe that dissent equals treason. But I think you can make a fairly substantial argument that without the influence of Cronkite, the United States would have deepened its involvement in Vietnam, and without the reporting of Peter Jennings, you would not have seen the steps in the Middle East that allowed us to go from the 1967 war to the Camp David Accords in just a decade.

It's difficult to add much to the requiems, odes and tributes to Peter Jennings that have been written and broadcast in the last two days; it is especially challenging to improve upon the essay by CNN's Aaron Brown, Jennings' one-time colleague at ABC. Say what you will about Brown, but he was, like his mentor, a voice of reason on September 11, and he is certainly the best writer among the major network correspondents. He said:

"For a thousand reasons, his death came too soon.

He should have been given the victory lap, the dinners, the articles, the awards, the accolades that mark a job well-done, a life well-lived. He deserved that. And though he would have said otherwise, I think he would have liked it. And we should have had more time to watch him work, to tell the stories that have yet to unfold.

But he would also say that he lived a charmed life. That he'd been to places, and told the stories, and had the experiences that a young boy imagined and dreamed about, and he did. And we should be grateful, all of us who watched him and those of us who were privileged to work with him, that we were part of the ride."

And it was too short a ride. If you want to know why network news is now terrible, consider this question: in the last four years, how many pieces of video have you seen of say, famine in Darfur, protests in the West Bank, Tony Blair in Parliament, or any story from southeast Asia? Only on World News Tonight. It took a tsunami and hundreds of thousands of deaths to get the other networks to send correspondents to Phuket, yet they all managed to send someone to Aruba to cover the apparently drug-related disappearance of one spoiled, rich white girl. Why is it that more people can produce the name of a 14-year-old girl abducted in Utah than can name the prime minister of Canada or the President of Mexico?

If you want to know why broadcast news is terrible, ask yourself if it's really important to have three weather forecasts during a half-hour news cast, or if you really give a good god damn whether the sports guy and the anchor go out for a beer between the 6 and the 11. Ask yourself why CBS spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants, then tells their female correspondents to grow out their hair and wear smaller earrings. Ask yourself why Ashleigh Banfield can't get a job, but any number of interchangeable blondes can go directly from the traffic chopper to news desk on WTTG (that's channel 5 in DC to you out-of-town folks, and shockingly, a Fox News outlet).

Buy a shortwave and listen to the BBC world service. Read the Financial Times. Use the world news function on Google. Go find out for yourself the names of the opposition leaders in Israel and Canada. Peter Jennings could. He used to remind his colleagues daily that the title of the program that he anchored was WORLD News Tonight.

As Dan Rather would have said, that is a part of our world this evening. We are better for having watched Peter, and worse off now that his chair stands empty.

posted by Kistulentz @ Wednesday, August 10, 2005