Shaped by, and for, the news

Peter Jennings’ untimely death Sunday put a period to the era in which network anchors derived their “authority” from journalistic experience, as well as on-camera presence.

If television viewers are unlikely to see his equal again, it has less to do with Jennings’ unique personal qualities -- formidable as they were -- than with the melancholy state of the three broadcast networks’ news operations. Years of shortsighted and unremitting cost-cutting by their corporate proprietors have made them shells of what they once were. Among the network and cable news divisions, only CNN maintains anything like a full-service foreign reporting operation; increasingly, even the others’ commitment to comprehensive domestic coverage is withering.

So if ABC wanted to cultivate another Jennings -- someone with a sophisticated reportorial background and an engaging broadcast persona -- it simply lacks the organizational ability to do it.

In 1965, for example, when the then-26-year-old Jennings had a disastrous first go at anchoring ABC’s nightly newscast, he described himself as “simply unqualified.” To remedy that, he spent more than a decade reporting from ABC bureaus in the Middle East and Europe. By the time he was named as one of three co-anchors of the network’s “World News Tonight” in 1978, he was ABC’s chief foreign correspondent.

Can anybody name the person who occupies that assignment today? Perhaps more important, can anyone imagine one of the current crop of television news “personalities” admitting he or she is unqualified to do anything from brain surgery to stand-up comedy?

Though wealth and celebrity came with his anchorman’s chair, Jennings never lost his field reporter’s legs. It seems a commonplace observation to make, but constantly gathering facts and, then, thinking about them in some systematic way is what prepares journalists to respond intelligently to the demands of breaking news. Most recently, many Americans saw Jennings do just that in the more than 60 hours of sober and reflective broadcasting he did in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities.

Monday, his former colleague Barbara Walters was among those who singled out Jennings’ nearly unmatched ability to ad lib smartly and often eloquently while covering developing stories. Canadian news anchor Lloyd Robertson said that “Peter brought a high quality of literature to electronic journalism. There was nobody who could put things together on the air as easily and as rapidly as he did.”

‘You never know when’

Part of that was mental agility, part unremitting attention to his work. During the mid-1990s, my wife, Leslie Abramson, was a legal analyst for ABC News. While on business in New York, she ran into Jennings, who invited her to join a group of network executives and broadcasters that night at the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual dinner.

During the course of the essentially ceremonial evening with its introductions and speeches, Leslie noticed Jennings repeatedly reaching into an inside coat pocket for a small, bound notebook in which he made notations.

“Are you taking notes on this?” she asked.

“No,” Jennings replied. “I write down thoughts as they occur to me. You never know when you’re going to need a good idea.”

Relentless and inquisitive preparation was one thing that distinguished Jennings’ journalism, but so did a perspective that actually was quite singular. The cool engaged-but-somewhat-apart persona that Jennings brought to his on-screen work was as much as matter of intellect as it was temperament. If you had commissioned his portrait, the ideal artist would have been one of those early German romantics -- say, Caspar David Friedrich -- whose subjects were neither too close nor too far off. Jennings the journalist was quintessentially a man of the middle distance.

Some of that may have been attributable to his Canadian origins. American attitudes toward the rest of the world tend to oscillate between hysterical triumphalism and lacerating self-loathing. Around both poles, what tends to be lost is the fact that there are other people in the world who live their own lives and act for reasons of their own. As a physically vast nation with a tiny population, most of which lives hard up against the United States, Canadians tend to approach other peoples and countries with a wry combination of self-deprecation and self-assertion. Those qualities were among the things that made Jennings a superb foreign correspondent.

Shortly after 9/11, Jennings became a naturalized American, though he retained his Canadian citizenship. In an interview with the Canadian Press at the time, he explained his decision: “I am a Canadian. My mother, like many of her generation, always found a reason to resent the United States and defined herself as a Canadian by being not American.” In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, however, Jennings experienced his connection to other Americans in an urgent new way. “I felt more attached to them than I perhaps had anticipated in emotional terms,” he said. “This is my home.”

As television news increasingly trades on attitude and entertainment rather than reporting and analysis, one of the things that will be missed most about Jennings and his work is the respect he showed for American viewers. Without intending to, he once summed that quality up in an interview with the Toronto Star:

“There are a lot of people in this business who believe that part of our job is to reassure the public every night. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially a rough draft of history. Some days it is reassuring. Some days it is absolutely destructive.”

One of the tragedies of our time is that the corporate time-servers who now direct the course of broadcast journalism do not share Peter Jennings’ faith that American viewers are entitled to that respect.

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Tim Rutten writes the Regarding Media column for the Los Angeles Times.