Poor Peter Jennings. In his prime, the most handsome of TV
personalities dies from cruel cancer and those he left behind
struggle mightily to attach more meaning to him than they have to.
We should think of him as a movie star, glamorous, classy, suave.
Good looks and gentlemanly demeanor still matter, more than ever in
fact. He was television news' leading man. Even Dan Rather knows as
much. Look at the nice things he's now saying about Peter, as if
battening on to Jennings will improve his own sorry reputation.
Sure Jennings drove many conservatives nuts, not just because he
was Canadian and couldn't pronounce "about." One remembers well his
covering for Bill Clinton and, in his earlier years, the pro-PLO
slant he legitimated in reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
But this was also the same Jennings who was easily friendly with
many conservatives and even went to bat for them behind the scenes.
His former colleagues remember him as a stern taskmaster and hard
worker, and there's no reason not to take them at their word. It's
only when deciding what it all meant that they fall into
difficulty. For them it's not enough to find comfort in the steady
job he did in his daily work. Television is artifice. Jennings
imbued it with more meaning than it warrants. No wonder so many
already miss the pleasure of his company.
For some reason TV honchos think covering a story is the
equivalent of breaking it. Thus ABC lauds its man for having been in Berlin "when the
Berlin wall was going up, and there in the '90s when it came down."
It says he covered "the civil rights movement in the southern
United States" and the "struggle for equality" against apartheid in
South Africa. He was "there ...when Solidarity was born in a Polish
shipyard, and again when communist leaders were forced from power."
He was all over the Soviet block "to record first the repression of
communism and then its demise." He was in Vietnam in the 1960s "and
went back to the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1980s to remind
Americans that, unless they did something, the terror would
return." Why, with a Herculean record like that, was he never
awarded even a Nobel Peace Prize? Instead, all he got were numerous
Peabody, du Pont, and Edward R. Murrow awards, and, for three
straight years, the Washington Journalism Review's "anchor
of the year" recognition.
One of the nicest things anyone has said of Jennings was
President Bush's closing remark yesterday, "May God bless his
soul." Wouldn't you know it, but the comment proved controversial.
The Associated Press did not include it in some of its reports, and when it did include the line it
decided to spell God as "god." CBS omitted the line from its
reports entirely. Bravely, CNN not only included the line, but
spelled God with a capital "G."
God and Jennings go back a ways. At the Media Research Center's
"DisHonors Awards" dinner last spring, just after it was learned
the Jennings was suffering from lung cancer, no one had the stomach
to make fun of a long-time nemesis. Indeed, everyone understood
that there were more important things in life than the left-right
fights that pass for domestic politics. But one speaker rather
gauchely expressed hope that Jennings would now be able to work on
his relationship with God. How lucky for everyone that our God is
one of forgiveness.
That will be of little consolation to Jon Friedman of CBS's
"MarketWatch," who yesterday praised ABC's and CNN's coverage of Jennings's
death while letting it be known that the other networks proved
woeful. "Either they were lazy or unprepared or disinterested [sic]
-- or maybe they simply preferred to broadcast old movies and
re-runs." Friedman's verdict: "Shame on them all." So the
post-Jennings era begins.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Television, Movies, Israel, Africa, Communism
