I hate waking up to distressing news.
It was with shock & great sadness that I discovered, this morning, the passing of legendary journalist and news anchor Peter Jennings.
His face will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched ABC World News Tonight: his deep, powerful voice; the sharp and vigorous analysis present in the news stories he helmed.
He was, without a doubt, an icon in television news…and one of the last of a rare breed…especially today, when American television news has reduced itself to ambulance chasing and the partisan crap of Fox News…and who knows what else, waiting in the wings of our tabloid-obsessed society.
Jennings was one of the three faces of American news over the last two decades, along with his colleages at NBC (Tom Brokaw) and CBS (Dan Rather). But there was something special about Jennings, compared to his stablemates…and certainly, he was much more physically vigorous about the stories he took to heart.
As a reporter, Jennings reported from the front lines of many of the past half-century’s most important events, including:
*The conflict in Vietnam, where he was one of the first reporters on the scene, in the 1960s.
*The civil rights movement in the southern United States during the 1960s.
*The struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
*The flowering of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s.
*The demise of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania.
*The end of the Berlin Wall in 1989
*both Iraq conflicts
But the most important thing to Canadians should be the reminder that he was one of us: born in Toronto, raised in Ottawa. Though he felt compelled to take US citizenship after the 9/11 attacks, he retained his Canadian citizenship…along with his love and appreciation for his home. His Canadian values were always on display in his work: balanced, non-judgemental, but possessing a keen and insatiable curiosity about the world outside the borders of the US. Not for him the inward-looking jingoism of a Bill O’Reilly, or the sensationalism that characterizes so much of CNN.
This is a great loss. Less and less do we see people able to communicate the human journey as magnificently as Peter Jennings was able to do, every night at 6:30pm. It is with great distress that I realize there is no one to replace him…not that anyone could. But his death marks the end of an era in so many ways, and I fear the next era of television journalims can’t ever hope to reach the heights he was able to set…
Rest well, Peter. You earned it.
