John Simpson on Peter Jennings

With the sad death of former ABC anchor Peter Jennings, I've been looking around for good eulogies from the media. One of the best I've found so far comes from the BBC's John Simpson. He has a lot to say about America's best news anchor by far - in fact Simpson describes Jennings as "probably the best in the world at his trade." But crucially, Jennings "always maintained a wry awareness that reporting, and fronting other people's reporting, for television was something pretty slight in the grand scale of things." Simpson says a good deal about Jennings' personal and professional talents, but the most saddening passage is this:

Peter did what he could to halt the downward spiral of television news in America - that terrible turning inward, which means the less you know about the world, the less you want to know about it, and therefore the less a ratings-obsessed industry decides to tell you. He often forced news items onto his programmes because they were important, not because the producers wanted them.

He loathed the arrival of the Fox network, with its open, noisy adherence to a political agenda, and believed it would destroy the old-fashioned notion of honest and unbiased reporting forever.

As for his own political opinions, I could never work them out. He would not tell me what he really thought about Clinton or George W Bush, and I eventually stopped asking him.

I really like that last bit. Poor old Peter Jennings. To this day, if I watch any network news broadcast, it'll be ABC - that is completely because of Jennings. I watched him for hours at the dawn of the new millennium and after 9/11, and many other times, and you could only respect the hell out of the fact that, somehow, he managed to stay above the mundance idiocy that increasingly surrounded him. Maybe his Canadian background helped; he maintained a small yet essential distance from America, even as middle America embraced him. I've said before that the people coming through America's news system are in no way comparable to the anchors of a generation ago. That's never more true when you consider the stature of Jennings against the pygmies and puffed-up, opinionated idiots that dominate news today. I don't care how many times you put Anderson Cooper or Brian Williams in a flak suit or on location overseas - these guys will never match up. Simpson puts it best:

Now, though, he seems to me like the last, best example of a tradition that had already started to vanish long before his death - the tradition of Martha Gellhorn and Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, people who went and found out what was really happening before they started to talk about it.

Nowadays, most American and British writing and broadcasting about subjects like Iraq is done by people who do not go there. Peter Jennings did go there, and continued to go even when he knew he was dying.

"What brings you here?" I asked him the last time I saw him, standing outside the Convention Centre in the Green Zone in Baghdad last January.

"Oh, the usual. Just trying to find out what's going on."

That was Peter's greatest art - or as he would have said, in his self-deprecating Canadian way, his skill. It is something which is fast disappearing.