The End of An Era?

Earlier this year, I was on my way to a movie on the upper west side on a bitterly cold February Sunday. As I walked with my companion, she briefly stopped and turned to her left.

“Did you see who that was?”

Being intent on getting to the theater in time to catch the movie, as well as wanting to get out of the cold, I had paid little attention to other pedestrians, “No, who are you talking about?”

She gestured back over her shoulder and up the side street we had just crossed pointing towards a man dressed an expensive looking overcoat making his way towards Colombus Avenue, “That was Peter Jennings!”

“Yeah the ABC studios are around the corner on 67th street.”

“But, he was walking a dog...”

Sure enough, when I looked again I noticed his right hand bore the telltale gesture of a dog-walker trying to reign in his pet. His left hand was held tightly at his side, shortly a small telltale cloud quickly appeared and then vanished in the cold winter breeze.



For more than two decades, he had been part of a trio of anchors – with Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC – who guided Americans through important news events on the major U.S. networks.

"There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe," he once told Jeff Alan, author of Anchoring America: The Changing Face of Network News.

"I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially – sorry, it's a cliché – a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.”

Jennings was part of an era, an era where Americans turned to the three large broadcast networks each evening to find out what was going on in the world. His integrity was never called into question and he will be missed.