Peter Jennings

Since I haven’t watched network evening news programs regularly for some years now, it’s been awhile since I’ve thought about how important the presence of Peter Jennings was, especially in those many years I was not in Washington or New York or even Boston, and it was his voice and his personality that tempered and gave good weight to, for example, the depressing horrors of the Reagan decade, when the hopeful areas of American policy and culture were dismembered, and the politics and society that’s dominant today was rearing its young and already ugly head.

Peter Jennings was literate, measured, couretous and good natured. How intelligent he actually was mattered less than how intelligent he seemed. He was an advertisement that intelligence might still matter. If we would just join him in weathering the shitstorm.

Apparently he was that calm only on the air. When he watched TV, he screamed at what those idiots were saying just like the rest of us.

It really helped that he was Canadian.

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