WHEN OUR TIME COMES
WILL THERE BE WAR WITH IRAN?
DEBATING WIKIMEDIA

Some years ago, Peter Jennings gave a friend of mine a cigarette lighter that his father, who had died of cancer, had given to him. Jennings had recently given up smoking, and said he wouldn’t need it anymore.

In the stress and pressure of 9/11, Jennings started lighting up again. You could hear what that led to in his last broadcast, when he reported on his diagnosis of lung cancer. On that newscast, he optimistically insisted he would be back. BBC reported: “For many viewers, the fear in his eyes and the fog in his voice came as much of a shock as the news itself.”

After an all-too-brief and brave fight, he died, one of 3,000 Americans who succumb to lung cancer each year. I am not sure of these stats. A Texas TV station reports 11,000 have the disease in the Lone Star State. (Marlboro country?)

Jennings was young, just 67. His family issued a statement: “Peter died with his family around him, without pain and in peace. He knew he’d lived a good life.” He is survived by his wife Kayce Freed, daughter Elizabeth, and son Christopher.

Peter Jennings died just like Edward R. Murrow before him, and so many others in our business who used to smoke on the air. I saw no one in the tobacco companies interviewed on Peter’s passing.

Broadcasting & Cable reported: “Smoking was one of the issues Jennings had focused on in his reporting career, including as recently as last September, when he did an hour prime time special on the ‘betrayal and neglect’ of the tobacco companies and some public health agencies who didn’t fight for anti-tobacco legislation when they had the chance.”

This affliction/addiction is not an abstraction to me because my father, who was a three-packs-a-day man, lost his leg thanks to the damage that the nicotine did to his system. He’s one of the lucky.

INSIDE ABC

I worked at ABC News in the years of Peter’s ascendancy as an anchor. In that position, he became the public face of ABC and, in a sense, its spokesman. In that role, he tempered his criticisms and deeper concerns positioning himself in the middle and above the fray. He was often approachable and we had a few conversations. In one, after I had left the network, he asked to be put him on the Mediachannel mailing list.

We were not friends, but I admired his knowledge as a journalist who had traveled the world and knew the issues as well as anyone and better than most. He was widely admired for his persona and reporting. His good looks, charm and style didn’t hurt.

Peter was never trained as a journalist, and in fact did not graduate from college or high school, which gives hope to those of us who believe in a more participatory type of citizens’ journalism. His father, however, was a broadcaster, and so he had more than a few breaks, including his own program at age 9. It was called “Peter’s People.”

HE SERVED THE SYSTEM

While his urbane and erudite manner seemed to propel him above the pack, we can’t forget that he worked in a system that values ratings more than reporting. He, too, was not above cashing in when he could, as in his last major documentary, produced for his own company — a kind of sweetheart deal with ABC — about flying saucers. While serious news junkies were debating the war and 9/11, Jennings was packaging UFOs for mass consumption.

UFO boosters critiqued the program, which followed a similar debunking of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists. His critics fire back:

http://www.disclosureproject.org/peterjenningsdefrauding.htm.

Oh, how those in the mainstream love to ridicule those who dissent from the conventional wisdom. When you are part of that system, it becomes part of you.

Peter became a celebrity and wore it well. But like his counterparts, he tended to rationalize our flawed news system while criticizing it on campuses or prestigious forums, but rarely on the air. At one such panel at Harvard, he acknowledged, “to our peril, we in TV news are obliged to get out the facts too quickly at the expense of context.”

His internal radar system taught him what he could get away with and how far to push the envelope while remaining in the good graces of the late Roone Arledge and other gods of news and Disney.

PETER AND THE WAR

ABC’s coverage of the Iraq war got off to a rocky start when a government tipster kept ABC in the dark about when the war would start. Jennings’s competitors were on the air while he was in a restaurant. This dirty trick was apparently payback for a story that aired a week earlier and that the Pentagon didn’t like. The bully boys on the right tried to tag Jennings as unpatriotic, as representing the liberal media. Perhaps it was fear of other smears that led him to become a U.S. citizen in 2003.

On this point, a site called NNDB reports:

“Cynics have suggested it was a shrewd move to counter criticism from U.S. arch-conservatives of his ‘liberal, Canadian’ reporting. ABC received thousands of complaints after Toby Keith’s in-your-face patriotic song ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue’ was nixed from Jennings-anchored Independence Day coverage in 2002. Keith complained loudly that an American like Dan Rather would’ve let him sing, and many people were offended enough to send Jennings ‘bus fare home to Canada.’ But Jennings says the citizenship switch was brought on by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — in the aftermath, he decided he was an American at heart. Jennings got a perfect score on his U.S. citizenship test, but he retains Canadian citizenship, too.”

Peter did specials on the war for children, but did not depart from the basic Pentagon narrative in most of his reporting for adults. Later, his boss at ABC, David Westin, a former corporate lawyer, would publicly admit that his network “let the American people down” by not being critical enough in the run-up to the war. Westin did the mea culpa, not Jennings, although some critics felt that ABC overall was marginally better in its coverage than the other nets.

SUSPICIONS IN TOKYO

Yesterday afternoon, Tokyo Broadcasting came in to talk to me about Jennings’s impact on journalism. Their reporter was impressed that Jennings almost alone among the anchors asked after 9/11, “Why does the world seem to hate us?” Their implication was that as a result of his probing, he worked in fear of being singled out for not being patriotic enough and became super-stressed. And so began to smoke again.

Did that turn him ultimately into a victim of the political environment? Did this context in the end kill him?

That may be going too far. We are all responsible for our vices (and virtues), but it is a link I hadn’t thought of. We have all heard of war correspondents suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Is there a variant of that disease for news anchors who operate in the most visible high-stress situations? Ask Dan Rather, who was forced to quit, or Tom Brokaw, who went willingly, what that job — for all its high salary and prestige — meant on a personal level.

HIS FANS LOVED HIM

Read the message board at ABCNews.com and you will see an outpouring of love and respect for Jennings — in part, I would guess, because he represented quality in a news system that has all but abandoned that quest and mission.

Howard Kurtz reported in the Washington Post: “It is in the nature of television fame that an anchor touches masses he has never met; as of yesterday afternoon, 25,000 people had posted online messages on ABC’s Jennings message board.”

News is changing. The days of the big anchors and the big networks are ending. If current trends continue, they will all be gone by the end of this decade. But what will come in their place? More screaming hosts Fox-style, or syrupy video “podcasts” a la Al Gore’s new Current channel.

Jennings is gone and network news is going. I wish I could say it doesn’t matter, but it does.

HAGIOGRAPHY

There were no critics on the airwaves. Everyone quoted the men he competed against, and they said what you would expect. No one speaks ill of the dead.

Brokaw: “We were not just competitors and colleagues. We were really friends. We had a lot of opportunities to reflect on this in the last year… It was a competitive brotherhood.”

Rather: “Inside that tall, handsome, elegant and eloquent exterior — inside that beat the heart of a fierce, but principled competitor. The last person you wanted to see coming on a story, particularly a big story, was Peter Jennings… How much did I keep an eye on him? Constantly. All the time.”

Koppel: “Jennings bore a not-slight resemblance to Roger Moore when he was playing James Bond.”

In many ways, this trio had been a trifecta with shared skills, different in style, perhaps, but rarely in substance. All cleaved to the center and safety of the mainstream.

THE POLITICS OF ANCHORDOM

The Daily Howler reminds us that Peter was not above pandering to the audience, as he did when he tried to get General Clark to denounce Michael Moore;

JENNINGS: At one point, Mr. Moore said, in front of you, that President Bush — he’s saying he’d like to see you, the general, and President Bush, who he called a ‘deserter.’ Now, that’s a reckless charge not supported by the facts. And I was curious to know why you didn’t contradict him, and whether or not you think it would’ve been a better example of ethical behavior to have done so.

Wow! Jennings felt he knew ‘the facts.’ Clark said he wasn’t so sure:

CLARK: Well, I think Michael Moore has the right to say whatever he feels about this. I don’t know whether this is supported by the facts or not. I’ve never looked at it. I’ve seen this charge bandied about a lot. But to me it wasn’t material. This election is going to be about the future, Peter. And what we have to do is pull this country together…

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh012304.shtml

At the same time, it must be reported that the right-wing Media Research Center was at this time trying to paint Jennings with a red brush. One example:

“ABC’s New McCarthyism

“ABC News has ignored the vicious anti-war rants of left-wing celebrities. But when actor Tim Robbins complained about being ‘punished’ for his unpopular views, Peter Jennings and company dedicated an entire segment to it and even compared a few ‘disinvites’ to McCarthy-era ‘blacklists.’”

(CyberAlert, April 17)
http://www.mrc.org/mrcspotlight/jennings/welcome.asp

An online encyclopedia notes:

“Supporters of Jennings contend that most critical reports of him consist of inaccuracies and/or out-of-context quotes. One critic is former ABC News reporter Peter Collins, who claims Jennings rewrote his piece on the 10th anniversary of the Sandinistas to make the account more favorable to the Sandinistas.”

Later, a Canadian documentary, “The Whole World Is Watching,” dissected news coverage of Nicaragua and showed how corporate news organizations, including ABC, largely followed the Reagan Administration line, perhaps until the on-camera killing of ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart by forces loyal to the dictator Somoza..

WITH A SONG IN HIS HEART

Jennings said that as a teen he had been “bored and lazy.” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, we learn:

“In his late teens and early twenties, he appeared in a number of amateur musical theatre productions with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society, including Damn Yankees and South Pacific. He later hosted a local television program called Club Thirteen, similar to American Bandstand. He also worked as a Royal Bank of Canada teller before his journalist days.”

There ain’t nothing like the game…