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THE PERSEVERANCE OF PETER JENNINGS
By Keith Olbermann
New York - April 5, 2005 - 10:05pmET
It is unbelievable. And unimaginable, and staggering, and heart-breaking. Peter Jennings revealed on this evening’s edition of ABC’s “World News Tonight” that he has been diagnosed with lung cancer.
It was self-evident in the television news industry that something had to have been seriously wrong for him to have not gone to the Indian Ocean to cover the tsunami, nor to Rome to cover the Pope’s illness. This is, after all, America’s international news anchor, the one who could’ve -- but in this remarkably competitive environment, didn’t -- flaunt the fact that he put in about fifteen years as a full-time foreign correspondent. We all knew there was something amiss. We all hoped it wasn’t anything like this.
He announced it himself -- first to his colleagues and then on his own newscast (ever the reporter), in a taped note that back-ended the work of fill-in Elizabeth Vargas. It was simply overwhelming to hear him insist that he will continue to anchor his newscast “on good nights; my voice will not always be like this,” yet to watch him not only labor with what sounded like a heavily constricted respiratory system -- but worse still to see him physically strain and contort himself just to force the words out.
I will not pretend to be even a professional friend of his -- we met once, unexpectedly, while we were each waiting to make on-stage presentations at an ESPN event. He was, as those who know him better will insist he always is, gracious and generous and encouraging, and true to at least one cliché of the Canadian -- an ardent hockey fan who feels beholden and brotherly to any American who supports the sport.
But for me, Jennings has been much more than just a mandarin of the industry. He is the personification of perseverance. It is amazing to remember that ABC first appointed him to anchor its news in 1965 -- sixteen years before Dan Rather got the job at CBS and eighteen before Tom Brokaw at NBC. Jennings was horribly overwhelmed, subjected to vicious criticism, and removed from the chair at the end of 1967.
In those days, even at the then turnover-happy ABC, that should’ve been the end of his career. But instead of letting that happen, or blaming somebody else, he took some of what was being said against him -- too green, too inexperienced, not worldly enough -- and decided to do something about it. He dived in at the deep end, and for the next fifteen years covered the world for ABC, and had become an expert in America’s place in it long before the wheel turned again in 1978 and Roone Arledge asked him to anchor from London while Frank Reynolds hosted from Washington and Max Robinson from Chicago.
It wasn’t exactly 40 years in the desert, but it was a dedication to self-improvement, to self-expansion, that is almost unimaginable in television today, as unlikely as the lightest weight local anchor you can think of setting off for the Middle East to become an investigative reporter focusing on terrorism. And I recall that during my panicky, mind-numbed channel surfing on 9/11, it was at ABC that I finally stopped. Peter Jennings’ calm demeanor and international perspective were reassuring and helpful in a practical way -- as respectful and stricken as anyone else on the air that fateful day, but also offering a context some others could not.
If calmness and perspective and perseverance are qualities of the lung cancer patients who survive the disease, Jennings has already gotten it beaten. But this is a terrible foe, and even the breathiest of us who announce the news every night can be left as physically drained afterwards as a singer or actor. As he noted tonight, he’s only shooting for the “good nights.” And even if he gets those, the landscape of the network television news industry (which, as noted here before, still dwarfs cable so greatly that even the bullies on our side of the schoolyard can’t even see the tops of the heads of the big kids on theirs) will have changed utterly in less than half a year.
It was only four months ago last Saturday that Tom Brokaw retired in favor of Brian Williams; next Saturday it will only have been a month that Dan Rather stepped aside to be replaced, temporarily at least, by Bob Schieffer. In that most optimistic of scenarios Jennings will -- as ABC has already noted -- require a variety a substitutes. The active seniority of network nightly newscasters will have been completely upended. It is neither unkind nor unhopeful to Peter, to recognize that Brian will, on a regular basis, be the longest-serving, with CBS in a planned interregnum, and ABC in the most unwanted, most heart-rending flux.
It is also discouraging to take a quick trip to the right wing blogs and see -- amid hundreds of supportive, humane responses from people who perceive bias in Jennings’ work -- a handful of odious observations like “the Lord does his work in truly mysterious ways,” or jokes about the Canadian national health service, or comments like “have they started starving him yet?” When you start reading stuff like that, or when you hear bad news about a rock-solid, hard-working person in your own field diagnosed with a dreadful disease, you need someone with the reassurance and perspective of a Peter Jennings.
When you realize that all of this destabilization is about Peter Jennings, the walls close in for a moment, and it becomes difficult to swallow.
E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
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