Peter Jennings will be missed
- From: Tiny Dancer <tinyd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:32:55 -0400
http://jam.canoe.ca/Television/2005/08/09/1164844.html
Peter Jennings will be missed
Intelligent and unflappable, Peter Jennings helped us understand a complex world
By BILL BRIOUX -- Toronto Sun
PIC: A portrait of ABC newsman PeterJennings is displayed on a giant
screen at the network's Times Square studios in New York, Monday
Aug. 8, 2005. Jennings, who announced in April that he had lung cancer,
died Sunday at his New York home, ABC News President David Westin
said in a statement. He was 67. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
There was no fancy catch phrase, no "And that's the way it is" or
"Courage." For 40 years at ABC -- 22 as sole anchor of World News
Tonight -- Peter Jennings simply aimed high and delivered the news.
He did it so well and for so long it never occurred to many of us that
he would someday not be there to help make sense of an often
frightening and confusing world.
"Because he was always there, you expect him to always be there,"
CBC's Peter Mansbridge told the Canadian Press. "Anchors are anchors.
They're sort of anchors to your life in many ways, too."
When CNN reported late Sunday night that the 67-year-old ABC News
anchor -- the last of the "Big Three" with the retirement of both Dan
Rather and Tom Brokaw -- had lost his brief battle with lung cancer,
there was a double sense of loss. Where was Peter Jennings' voice
on this story?
While colleagues such as Barbara Walters and Ted Koppel quickly
called their reactions in to CNN, Jennings' urbane, informed, insightful
take was missing. He had the gift of instant analysis that was never
glib or shallow. As CTV's Lloyd Robertson put it, "There was nobody
who could put things together on the air as easily and as rapidly as
he could."
For Canadians, it went even deeper. Toronto-born, Ottawa-raised
Jennings was the cool, Canadian head at the centre of a highly-competitive
and powerful American news business. He represented how we like
to be seen by Americans and the rest of the world: Unflappable,
intelligent and informed and, hell, yes, dashing.
He was, in short, a class act.
His marathon stint during the 9/11 attacks was vintage Jennings.
He got on the air within minutes and stayed there for days and
never, not once, lost his cool. I remember watching in awe as,
near the end of another 14- or 16-hour shift, he turned to a
New York firefighter in the studio and had the compassion and
the presence of mind to ask, "What are the questions we haven't
asked yet?"
Jennings was smart enough to know he and ABC never had all
the answers and, by extension, neither did the United States.
His genuine curiosity and thirst for knowledge and information
was contagious and made watching his newscast a shared
learning experience, never a lecture.
His rich and absorbing ABC News specials, which ran the gamut
from the search for UFOs to the search for Jesus, were like
manna from heaven. That an American network could devote
two or three hours of prime time to a spiritual icon when every
other channel was searching for Idols, Bachelors or Big Brothers
was, literally, an act of faith. Jennings had the respect and power
to make it happen and rightly assumed that there were viewers
who were eager -- some desperate -- to be informed as well as
entertained.
I met him on a couple of occasions, most memorably several years
ago in Toronto at a gathering of the electronic news elite. Besides
Jennings, Canadian-born U.S. news stars such as Henry Champ,
Keith Morrison and Morley Safer rubbed shoulders with Robertson
and Mansbridge. Jennings stood tallest, both literally and figuratively.
I was impressed with how friendly he was and also how rumpled --
he looked as if he had slept in his wrinkled sports coat, not at all
the permanent pressed, "James Bond" of news anchors who
always seemed so buttoned-down on TV.
He spoke with passion that night of his father, Charles Jennings,
a CBC radio newscaster. Jennings felt great pride at being part
of a distinguished tradition of Canadian news gatherers. He felt
very at home in our city, even though it had been decades
since he had spun a CTV news gig into a shot at American fame.
Jolted by the 2001 attacks on America, Jennings finally became
a U.S. citizen in 2003. Yet he remained a champion of his native
land and never hesitated to wave our flag. "To me," said Robertson,
"Peter never lost his Canadian soul."
It was that outsider, immigrant perspective that seemed to give
him a broader world view other U.S. network anchors often lacked.
It is a view that will be missed, almost as much as the man himself.
Cheers,
TD
I always loved that guy
and he's not on TV anymore
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