JENNINGS DEATH IS LOSS TO JOURNALISM
8 August 2005

Peter Jennings, top news anchor at ABC News in the US, died on Sunday after delivering TV news in five separate decades. Jennings, a long-time smoker, had been suffering from lung cancer, having only announced four months ago he would seek treatment.

Jennings was part of the group of three trusted broadcasters who headed the national evening news for the three big US networks, and his death may mark the true end of an era of broadcast news and journalism as a profession.

He was known for the serious easy tones of his delivery, his vast global reporting experience, and his determination to tell the truth of events. He has been quoted as saying he sought not to reassure the public, but to provide "a rough draft of history", adding that "Some days it’s reassuring, some days it’s absolutely destructive."

In the week following the attacks of 11 September 2001, he spent 60 hours on air working to bring the truth of the moment to viewers. He was an example of the hard-working informed journalist who worked to serve his audience through excellence, not through content or fashion. His loss will be felt at a time when news delivery is increasingly mixed with entertainment.

Jennings' father, Charles, was the first nightly broadcast news anchor in Canada and eventually came to be head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news group. Jennings started his career early, never finishing high school and never attending college. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, working for Canadian television, he was offered a position with ABC News, and the following year, at age 26, he was elevated to nightly news anchor, broadcasting opposite industry standards Walter Kronkite and David Brinkley.

Lacking experience in hard reporting, he became a foreign correspondent and later opened ABC's news bureau in Beirut. When Israeli athletes were taken hostage at the 1972 Olympics, he and a crew hid in the athletes' quarters to get a closer look at the story, and a 1974 report on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat won him a Peabody award.

For 10 years, starting in 1986, he was the most-watched network news anchor, and in 1993, two-thirds of local broadcasters named him best news anchor in a Broadcasting & Cable survey. Jennings exuded the sense that journalism was a way of living, not just a job, and that it must be rooted in a firm devotion to authenticity in reporting events. [For more: JG]

Jennings remembered: CNN
Post your message of rememberance: BBC
International view: NewKerala