The Peter (Jennings) Principle

by Michael Winship

Watching and reading the obituaries for and appreciations of Peter Jennings has been difficult. Which is strange.

We'd met once or twice, but I didn't know him. I never had the pleasure of working with him, although I have many friends who did. To a person they testified to his graciousness and collegiality -- and they freely offered that opinion long before his illness was announced.

No, it's hard, in part, because he was so familiar in other ways. Night after night, year after year, there he was in the living room imparting the news of real-life triumphs or fresh disasters. He guided us through catastrophes in space and at Ground Zero, royal weddings and election nights, fireworks and funerals.

That familiarity -- their seeming presence in our homes -- is part of what makes television personalities different from movie stars, who appear to us (although less and less so) as giants on a big, bright screen in a darkened theater.

TV folk are more our size. We more readily make them -- and their characters -- part of our lives. A friend of mine had trouble dating a television actor -- whom eventually she married -- because at first, she couldn't separate his truly engaging self from the sniveling snob he played on a British mini-series.

I met a guy from Ottumwa, Iowa, once, and instantly said, "Oh, I know someone from Ottumwa," only to realize, moments later, I was thinking of Radar O'Reilly on "MASH."

But in the case of Jennings, it wasn't simply the feeling that somehow you knew the guy because he was on television. He was, as were Brokaw and Rather, and before them, Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley, a benign authority figure, guiding us through the intricacies and vagaries of the world.

They didn't just read to us the news: they knew the news, or so it seemed, because they actually had been to the places they were telling us about and could elucidate with experience and erudition. "Any fool can point a camera at something," a network news executive said to me once. "You need somebody to say what the significance of the picture is, or you'll never know. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture without any words is not necessarily conducive to understanding."

Unfortunately, understanding doesn't seem to be what television news is about anymore. That's another reason the Jennings obits were hard to view: they were reminders of the stories Jennings thought were important and fought to get on the air, reported at length: the Middle East (long before most Americans paid it much attention), African famine, Bosnia, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc.

Back in the sixties, the legendary CBS News President Fred Friendly said, "The news is the one thing that the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap -- and they know it." But news largely succumbed long ago. "The problem isn't about left or right," former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton said at a conference I attended a few weeks ago. "It's about what's left out."

What we're increasingly exposed to are saturation coverage of missing white girls and blips of copy read to us by graduates of the Ted Baxter School of Broadcasting. You remember: Lou Grant tells Ted, "China has just signed a mutual-defense pact with Albania." Ted replies, "Albania? That's the capital of New York, isn't it?"

Or: "Today was the end of the auto show in Minneapolis, so let's observe four minutes of silence." It would be funnier if it weren't so close to the truth. Friends in the business and I have witnessed it firsthand.

The trivializing of reality -- whether on the pervasive, often oxymoronic reality shows or the 24-hour cable news channels -- is disheartening at best, enraging, even detrimental to society at worst. Too often, you can get a better grasp of international news watching Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show."

David Shaw, the Los Angeles Times media critic who, coincidentally, died just last week, estimated that in the last twenty years, TV coverage of international affairs has declined by as much as 80 percent. Yet in 2003, 83 percent of the American public said they got most of their international news from TV. Yikes.

Finally, what made the Jennings news hard was the cause of death. Lung cancer took my father at a young age, too. He was only 62 and a chain smoker up until a near fatal car accident in 1967. That led to the loss of one lung, so when the cancer struck, he was, as Mark Twain would have said, a sinking ship with no cargo to throw overboard.

So if you want to pay Peter Jennings proper homage there are two things you can do: try to keep television news on its toes with your letters, e-mail's and phone calls, critiquing its content, or lack thereof. And write a check to Memorial Sloan-Kettering or the American Cancer Society.