Perhaps it was the occasional Canadian pronunciation. Maybe it was the sophisticated manner, even when defending ice hockey.
For whatever reason, the adjective most commonly applied to Peter Jennings is “suave.” Surely the ABC News anchorman was that, and his appeal telegraphed well on television. But he was smart beyond the smooth charm.
Jennings, who forever will remain an icon from an age when three white men delivered an account of the day’s news to most of America at the dinner hour, was an overachieving journalist beyond being a handsome news reader.
One of three anchors who held extraordinarily consistent positions of authority on the American airwaves for decades, he was the first to die.
He died Sunday, at 67, after a brief battle with lung cancer.
The globe-trotting Jennings made regular trips to Colorado, to pump up morale and meet a procession of incoming managers at KMGH-Channel 7, the ABC affiliate, as well as to report.
Most recently he spoke at a February luncheon downtown, remarking on the retirements of colleagues Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather (he found the latter “surprising”), the misstep involving inauthentic documents at CBS News, his views on the changing information age and his promise to fight ABC management if “Nightline’s” slot were given to a comedian.
“I personally regret the country is not more acquainted with the wounded from Iraq, part of that surely a function of local television,” he said. He dashed on deadline to write a story for the evening newscast, which he anchored outside in the sleet.
Two months later, on April 5, he announced that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Taking stock in 1993, I wrote that ABC News continued to lead the national news pack, “with Peter Jennings the most ‘modern’ of the anchormen. Jennings alone seems fully aware of the global impact of his medium and its ongoing changes.”
Jennings was keenly interested in the digital age, to the point of pressing his network to allow him to anchor real-time Internet coverage of the Democratic national convention, albeit to a minimal audience.
At the time of Disney’s takeover of ABC, Jennings shared the concerns of critics regarding the bottom-line expectations of the once-sacrosanct news division. Always a major asset to the network, he was known as a prickly presence to management. Yet he was lavishly praised by ABC News colleagues who found him particularly decent and hardworking. (In “Three Blind Mice,” Ken Auletta’s classic account of the TV networks, correspondent Barry Dunsmore is quoted as saying, “Peter is a man who has succeeded without leaving any dead bodies behind.”)
Although Jennings had not been on the air for four months, his absence is palpable.
Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at California State University in Los Angeles, cites research confirming that it is normal, when pivotal television figures are removed from daily screen life, for viewers to feel “like they’ve had a death in the family.”
The emotional import of the continual, reliable presence of a major anchor, a nightly visitor to the living room, is very real for generations of viewers.
“I don’t think we will see their like again,” Fischoff said. “It doesn’t compute in the contemporary way of information gathering.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
