What We've Lost
Peter Jennings used his power to make sure we learned about international news that mattered
I didn't know Peter Jennings well and I'm not the best person to assess his many fine qualities as a person. But I do know what American journalism has lost with his death on Sunday--its most prominent and influential advocate of international reporting. People in television news who want to honor him should do so by resolving to include more foreign reporting in their broadcasts, even if it means lower ratings.
That's what Jennings did. I last spoke to him about six months ago, before he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I asked him how long it would take "World News Tonight" to move into first place now that Tom Brokaw was stepping down as anchor of "NBC Nightly News." It was a social occasion and Jennings was typically blunt. "We'll never catch them," he said. Jennings explained that he had lost his lead during the 1994 O.J. Simpson case, when he refused to air nearly as many O.J. stories as the competition. He still went lighter on tabloid stories and heavier on foreign news, he said, and thus would never be number one again.
I'm not sure Jennings was right. The reasons for TV news ratings are complicated and if Brokaw successor Brian Williams hadn't sprinted out of the gate so smoothly, Jennings might have passed him. But beneath the ratings talk was a justifiable pride in how he had chosen to use his fame over the years. At the expense of ratings, he insisted that his broadcast live up to its name as "World News Tonight." The challenge on a 22-minute broadcast is story choice. Every day, Jennings chose to cover a foreign news story or two that he knew would be an invitation to change the channel.
It's easy for TV news to cover the big, breaking foreign story or the juicy terrorism angle. What's much harder is finding a way to convey important but visually uninteresting stories from around the world. Jennings spent two decades in the anchor chair committed to doing so. If Pakistan, say, had an election, viewers were much more likely to learn about it on ABC News than anywhere else. As we know post 9/11, events like a Pakistani election are more consequential and relevant to our own lives than we used to think. The really scary thing is that even after 9/11, most TV news has moved away from complex foreign stories and back toward the latest entertaining distraction or news you can use.
The reason, of course, is money. If you want to get ahead as a news producer, you better give the audience what it wants, not what it needs. I don't mean to overstate the case here. Jennings was a highly competitive guy who wanted to win in the ratings and he gave his audience plenty of cotton candy. His "Person of the Week" feature accelerated the trend toward personalizing every news story. But he still did something rare and principled: Because ABC couldn't fire him without losing ratings, management had to give him a wide berth. He used that power to achieve something significant, year after year.
The rap on Peter Jennings was that he took himself too seriously. I'm glad he did, because that meant that he took us seriously, too, and our need to know about things that are distant and complicated but a lot more important than most of what passes for news.
