<< Return to Site News
August 09, 2005
News with Personality
I was stunned, as so many were, to hear of the passing of Peter Jennings. Only four months ago he announced he had lung cancer but no mention was made of how advanced it was. Though his voice was hoarse when he made the announcement that he had inoperable lung cancer, I hoped he would somehow pull through.
As someone else mentioned, people of my age, those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, can't remember a time before Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather. Their voices and faces on the nightly news punctuate the memories of my childhood. Every evening my parents would turn on the network news and it would seem as if all were right in the world, even if what they reported was at times depressing and disturbing. My parents were not devoted to any one anchor or network. They flipped between them depending on their mood, so I learned to like them all. They were familiar faces in our living room in a time before cable news and the Internet. We only had a few choices and a few channels.
The idea of network news seems so quaint now, much like other relics from my childhood like record players and after-school specials. But there's a reason the nightly network news still exists, even though we can get our news elsewhere: it gives us the false but comforting sense that the world is manageable, that all the news we need to know can fit into a half-hour chunk, whereas the 24-hour news channels remind us that we're on a non-stop rollercoaster of a planet.
With the retirement of Brokaw and Rather and the death of Jennings, I hope the media world doesn't become a non-stop, chaotic barrage of news and information without any solid personalities to anchor it. Because that's what Peter Jennings did and why he was so beloved and welcomed into our homes: he anchored us. He made us feel that even though the world was a mess, tomorrow would be another day, that he'd be there again tomorrow to report the news. Without that sense of grounding, we're left bobbing aimlessly in a sea of information.
It's one of the reasons I started this site and why the slogan Health information with personality is more than just a slogan to me. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that without a human face behind it, a constant stream of news and information is disturbing. Pretty soon, as every newscast turns into the same mind-numbing, flashing, ticker-streaming blitz with robotic, airbrushed "anchors", the news will start to have no meaning. It's like what happens when you're standing in the middle of a cloud: when you're in the middle of it, you can't see it. Somehow, the old school news anchors helped us to stand outside of that cloud and view the world with some degree of objectivity.
Peter Jennings gave us news with personality. And then some. In these terrifying and uncertain times, we needed him more than ever.
Posted by Tracy on August 9, 2005 12:49 AM
