Working on the ‘Dream’

Peter Jennings marks his 20th anniversary as the sole anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” on Sept. 5. But first he’s offering Thursday’s hourlong report on the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, taking viewers back to a difficult time in U.S. history.

Call it a bout of nostalgia. The King special puts the speech into its original tumultuous context -- something that has become obscured as the speech has evolved into a moment of triumph. It’s a traditional historical-footage-and-talking-heads documentary, the kind that was routine on commercial networks two decades ago but in today’s ratings-driven world has largely been displaced by newsmagazines chasing after the celebrity “get.”

Many of the players in the program are familiar, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), but the pictures aren’t, much of the footage having been culled from universities and libraries, after shortsighted networks destroyed their pictures of the era. Even though the three broadcast networks of the era covered the speech itself, only two complete recordings remain, Jennings said in an interview, noting, “A lot of people didn’t realize at the time how important it was.”

The program also takes Jennings back to his ABC roots. One of his first assignments when he arrived at the network was to cover the civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., in the aftermath of King’s speech. “At the beginning of 1964, someone said, ‘Go get on a plane,’ and I did,” Jennings said. “What I remember in an overwhelming way was being frightened much of the time.” While reporting Thursday’s program, he said, he realized “how much there is to forget,” 40 years being at once both long ago and “like yesterday.”

In those four decades, of course, Jennings himself made his way up the reporting ladder to the anchor chair, originally as part of the troika of anchors for “World News Tonight,” which celebrated its 25th anniversary in July. In its first incarnation, Jennings anchored from London, with Max Robinson in Chicago and Frank Reynolds in Washington, D.C. It was a Cold War era when a single newscast -- the first one that the three co-anchored -- contained almost a half-dozen separate reports on the Jewish dissident trials in Moscow, a time when Washington and foreign policy news dominated the evening newscasts before being edged out by news about the economy, health and lifestyles.

Jennings’ take on the changes is ambivalent. With the explosion in the number of news outlets in the last 20 years, from Fox News to the Internet, there’s “no question that millions of members of the public have greater access to the public debate,” he says. “At the same time, in the intervening years, news divisions and the corporations that own news divisions came to the conclusion that news should be moneymaking and, secondly, should never be money-losing. And having made a huge amount of money, and become accustomed to it, the idea of putting on a broadcast simply for the good of the country is less likely to occur.”

Several months ago, Jennings said, he came across a trove of old NBC News files saved by his father-in-law, Fred Freed, a former NBC News executive. They included ads NBC had taken out for its “White Paper” documentaries, “just for the simple pride of saying what they had on the air.” The original network owners, Jennings marveled, “took it upon themselves to compete with one another in doing something important to the nation.”

Now, it is anchors like Jennings and NBC’s Tom Brokaw who use their clout to push through programs like Thursday’s “Peter Jennings Reporting -- I Have a Dream.” The documentary is the first of four this year from PJ Productions, a separate production company Jennings set up as part of his most recent contract renewal, announced in November.

The others, which will air before the end of the year, will include a report on the link between government policy and obesity, titled “Fat Food Nation,” and a long-in-the-works project on early Christianity, told through the life of St. Paul. Like other news organizations, ABC will also mark the 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November; Jennings will anchor a two-hour program that he says will put to rest any lingering ideas about “conspiracy and cover-up.”

Jennings said he refuses to believe network documentaries are a dying art. “People in the network were not hugely keen” on ABC News’ 24-hour millennium coverage in 2000, he said, “but it was hugely successful.” Some network executives were resistant to his program a couple of years ago on new historical research on Jesus, but viewers found it too, despite little publicity. Nonetheless, he admits, “you have to accept that it’s not going to be a huge mass audience.”

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‘Peter Jennings Reporting’

What: Report on the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Where: ABC

When: Thursday, 10 p.m.