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MOURNING PETER JENNINGS…
AND TV JOURNALISM
August 12, 2005
First thing Monday morning, after rising from a good night's sleep, I headed straight to my computer and fired it up to make sure the space shuttle Discovery returned to Earth without incident. Turns out, it hadn't started its descent yet; the landing had been postponed due to inclement weather. Instead, taking the spot where I expected to find the NASA story was a different headline, this one telling me that Peter Jennings, the face of ABC News for most of my life, had died.
This column is not a Peter Jennings eulogy. Truthfully, I don't know much about him, beyond that I always preferred his straight-ahead style of television news reporting to Tom Brokaw's mechanical vocal stylings and Dan Rather's lyrical flights of fancy. As a newspaper guy, I've never been much for TV news, which, at the local level, is often a laughingstock, and at the national level, can rarely cover a story to the extent that print journalism can.
So I found it somewhat ironic that here I was reading about Jennings' sad passing on my too-small Compaq monitor rather than catching the news on CNN, MSNBC or ABC itself. The notion that people are moving away from TV toward other sources to discover the world's newsworthy happenings is by no means an unreported topic. Jennings' death comes less than a year after the departures of Rather and Brokaw, and as each left their anchor chairs, the departure was described as if it was another death spasm for TV journalism.
What shocks me is that this continues to be news at all. Can anyone really be surprised that I'd rather click to My Yahoo! Page for the morning's top stories than flip to any TV news outlet? Consider the television news events that gained national attention over the last several months. Make a short list in your mind of the ones you come up with. Mine looks like this:
-- CNN pundit Robert Novak shouting an obscenity and storming off the "Inside Politics" set after some of the usual prodding from the Democrats' favorite talking head, James Carville.
-- Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise having a row over the value of psychiatric drugs to treat postpartum depression on NBC's "Today." Cruise accused Lauer of being "glib." Lauer essentially told Tom that he was full of himself. People across the U.S. slapped their heads at the obviousness of it all.
-- Hour after hour after hour after hour of Michael Jackson trial coverage, especially the freaks gathered across the street to support Jacko, spread ad nauseum up and down your cable channels.
-- ABC's "Primetime Live" breaking the hot-off-the-presses story that "American Idol" may be tainted because Paula Abdul was allegedly helping (and sleeping with) one of the male contestants.
The sum of these events is what TV news has become - a brash chronicler of pop culture catastrophes and political shout fests disguised as editorial. Discovery did finally land safely on Tuesday morning, a piece of info I'm sure I could have gleaned from the television. But that would have meant putting up with other nonsense that I had no desire to see. So, again, it was back to the Internet.
Jennings will be missed. He seemed like a good man, a proud journalist. Who knows if ABC will ever replace him? CBS has yet to replace Rather. It's like the networks realize they have nothing important enough to report that would require an anchor who conveys intelligence, authority, and compassion. Jennings possessed all three. So does a significant amount of journalism that can be found on the Internet and in newspapers and magazines around the country, if you know where to look. That's more than enough to give them the edge over television in the post-Rather-Brokaw-Jennings era.
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