World television lost one of its
stars yesterday with the death from lung cancer of Peter Jennings,
evening newsreader for more than 20 years on the American ABC network.
Read The New York Times obituary here (requires registration).

I
became an avid watcher of ABC News when I first moved to the US in
1987. The choice for television news was between Jennings, Dan Rather
on CBS and Tom Brokaw on NBC (we didn’t have cable, and in any case CNN
was in its infancy, and Fox News was just a gleam in Uncle Rupert’s
eye).

CBS and NBC were still trading on the reputations of their
recently-retired, long-serving news anchors, Walter Cronkite and John
Chancellor. ABC, much the youngest of the three networks, had no such
legacy, and it always seemed to offer a fresher approach: brighter-lit
set, cleaner graphics, and so on. Perhaps it was partly that Jennings,
a Canadian by birth, had a more neutral accent that was easier for an
Australian to understand. But his rivals always seemed stodgy and
old-fashioned by comparison.

Jennings was a young-looking 50ish
(actually a little older than Brokaw), always calm, urbane, reassuring.
Unlike most Australian newsreaders, he gave the impression that he
understood what he was talking about – that it was not just words on an
autocue. That impression was reinforced by the network’s habit of
sending him to broadcast on the spot from the scenes of major events,
such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. But unlike Rather, he never seemed
to have his own axe to grind: one had confidence in his impartiality.

I
continued to watch ABC whenever I was in America, and I was always
pleased when major events there would bring Jennings to our screens
here. He will be greatly missed. For one Australian at least, he helped
to make a strange world a little more comprehensible.