Reply #94: Rest in Peace [View All]

[julialnyc]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4131186.stm
Peter did what he could to halt the downward spiral of television news in America - that terrible turning inward, which means the less you know about the world, the less you want to know about it, and therefore the less a ratings-obsessed industry decides to tell you.


Jennings reported on the Iraqi elections in January 2005

He often forced news items onto his programmes because they were important, not because the producers wanted them.

He loathed the arrival of the Fox network, with its open, noisy adherence to a political agenda, and believed it would destroy the old-fashioned notion of honest and unbiased reporting forever.

As for his own political opinions, I could never work them out. He would not tell me what he really thought about Clinton or George W Bush, and I eventually stopped asking him.

Old-fashioned journalism

As a Canadian, he was a bit of an outsider, though in the end he became an American citizen and was very proud of the fact.

He was seven years older than me, but looked a good 10 years younger.

"I can't spend what you do on make-up," I once said to him nastily. "It's all just appearance," he answered.

Now, though, he seems to me like the last, best example of a tradition that had already started to vanish long before his death - the tradition of Martha Gellhorn and Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, people who went and found out what was really happening before they started to talk about it.

Nowadays, most American and British writing and broadcasting about subjects like Iraq is done by people who do not go there.

Peter Jennings did go there, and continued to go even when he knew he was dying.

"What brings you here?" I asked him the last time I saw him, standing outside the Convention Centre in the Green Zone in Baghdad last January.

"Oh, the usual. Just trying to find out what's going on."

That was Peter's greatest art - or as he would have said, in his self-deprecating Canadian way, his skill. It is something which is fast disappearing.