Peter Jennings died today.
This presents a problem for me, although not as large as the one presented his family and friends. Hopefully, Peter’s problems are over, as death pretty much wipes the slate of the daily troubles left behind on earth.
My aforementioned problem is this: I now have nobody solid to believe. Since reaching the age where I could realize there was a wide world out there and it was filled with wars, famines, cyclones, disease, and economic disasters, I accepted Jennings’ take on how each of these would impact the United States in general and me in particular and took it as gospel. You may ask “But what about Cronkite? How about Huntley and Brinkley? They were on the air almost as long as Jennings. How come you couldn’t believe them?” The answer to these questions lie squarely in my own young life, and my lowered ( or lack of ) opinion of these venerable newsmen was ( or wasn’t) formed by one simple fact: I couldn’t receive news from either CBS or NBC—our TV had but rabbit ears and ABC was the only clear signal that made it to my tiny town in the rural Midwest, so Jennings became my Authority by default.(To clarify this situation, we later got better televisions, our local network affiliates got better at transmitting, and we had access to the other networks, but the die had already been cast and I never granted the other newsmen the credibility I gave to Jennings. Doing so would be akin to accepting a replacement grandfather after learning about the world at the knee of the genuine article: they just never earned their bones, so to speak.)
This is not to say I saw Jennings as a grandfatherly type. On the contrary, he seemed more like a wise older brother or uncle- old enough to know what was going one, but young enough to change with the timesand styles of the last few decades. Unlike Walter, Chet, and David, Peter could crawl into a safari jacket and look like he was ready to cover a war instead of going birdwatching. Even when he was dressed for combat, however, Jennings maintained a calm, steady, reassuring demeanor, which is more than I could ever say about The Artist Formerly Known As Jerry Rivers or that sideshow act Dan Rathers. Both of those characters always seemed more interested in conveying how brave they were than what was actually coming down.
Since the decades to which I refer have been times of incredible change, there has been a hell of a lot of news to see- the time when space travel, heart transplants, computers, and wireless telephones ceased being sci-fi fluff and part of everyday life. We’ve endured the Cold War, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq Part One, Grenada, Panama, Iran, El Salvador, Watergate, racial and philosophical riots, a Presidential assassination, a couple other attempts, and sexual and technological revolutions. We’ve seen death by Russia replaced byAIDS and Betty Crocker replaced by Betty Friedan. We’ve met the Beatles said goodbye to half of them, cloned sheep, burned bras, draft cards, the Cuyahoga River, and copious amounts of marijuana. We’ve put men on the moon and leered at the Titantic on the bottom of the sea. As that new kid from Minnesota said. “Thetimes, they are a-changing.”
Jennings told me about most of these changes, and I never doubted his veracity or integrity. He was a true professional.
In the last fifteen or twenty years, the cable explosion has bombarded me with more news than I need: round-the-clock reports of everything going on everywhere on (and off of) the planet, now supplemented by wire-service crawls across the bottom and charts, graphs, and flashing logos on the periphery. The only thing these news mills lack is precision. Since they’re not restricted to a timeslot, they have the time for egregious speculation, slipshod reporting, and the obligation to keep the Information Pipeline filled whether there is news or not. In my opinion, the cable news networks could can a few of the special effects and learn how to edit. Better yet, they could resurrect Peter Jennings and allow him to teach them electronic journalism.
Now, THAT would be news.