Peter Jennings
Overview
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada is a Canadian national order, admission into which is, within the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, the second highest honour for merit...

 (July 29, 1938 – August 7, 2005) was a Canadian American journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 and news anchor. He was the sole anchor of ABC's World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005 of complications from lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...

. A high-school dropout, he transformed himself into one of American television's most prominent journalists.

Jennings started his career early, hosting a Canadian radio show at the age of nine.
Quotations

Good evening. We begin tonight...

His standard lead in line as ABC News anchor.

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

Interview in Anchoring America: The Changing Face of Network News (2003) by Jeff Alan

"I'm a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective," Jennings said. Jennings said that everyone — even journalists — have points of view through which they filter their perception of the news. It could be race, sex or income. But, he said, reporters are ideally trained to be as objective as possible. "And when we don't think we can be fully objective, to be fair."

Interview for KETV NewsWatch 7 as quoted in article at The Omaha Channel (19 October 2004)

There will be good days and bad, which means that some days I may be cranky and some days really cranky!

Memo to his staff announcing that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. (April 2005)

I don't think anybody who looks carefully at us thinks that we are a left-wing or a right-wing organization.

We have been criticized, a little bit to my surprise, by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that.

Are we out of step with the administration because we do not comport completely to their political point of view?... So they criticize us for it. It goes with the territory, and if we get a groundswell we begin to look at ourselves.

I don't think the public realizes how much soul-searching goes on in news organizations about what is the right thing to do.

 
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