Peter Jennings

Born in Toronto, Ontario Canada, Jennings was the son of Charles Jennings, the first news anchor and head of the news department at the CBC. After the family moved to Ottawa, Ontario, Peter grew up there and attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Carleton University, and Rider College in New Jersey. He never graduated from high school or college, preferring to begin his radio career.

He got his start in broadcasting at the age of nine, hosting a weekly half-hour CBC Radio kids' show called Peter's Program. In his late teens and early twenties, he appeared in a number of amateur musical theatre productions with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society, including Damn Yankees, South Pacific, and Club Thirteen. He also worked as a Royal Bank of Canada teller before his journalist days. At the age of 23, he was hired by a local radio station in Brockton, Ontario. As he quickly ascended the industry ladder, Canada's first private TV network CTV (a competitor of his father's network), hired Jennings to co-anchor its late-night national news. He was assigned to cover civil rights activities, where he was noticed by American network ABC and in 1964 was hired away as a correspondent. Barely a year later, he was given several high-profile reporting opportunities for what was then a 15-minute news broadcast on ABC Evening News.

Anchor career

He could not compete with older anchors of other networks such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. His Canadian English accent and mistakes from inexperience with American topics led to his being replaced in 1968.

Determined to rebuild his career, Jennings stayed with ABC but sought a foreign correspondent position, placing him in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanese civil war, putting him into contact with world leaders and granting him intimate knowledge of important regions, such as Jennings again found note as the ABC reporter on scene during the Munich Olympics massacre.

Beginning in 1978, Jennings was part of a three anchor team on "World News Tonight", with Frank Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson from Chicago and Jennings from London. A year later, he married his third wife, author Kati Marton, whom he had two children with, Elizabeth and Christopher.

After Reynolds' unexpected death in 1983, the president of ABC News Roone Arledge first chose Tom Brokaw, NBC's White House Correspondent, to take the top job as main news anchor. Brokaw turned down the offer and took over as sole anchor on the NBC Nightly News. Jennings was then selected, starting on September 5, 1983, and became a very influential TV personality. On December 31, 1999, 175 million people tuned into at a least a portion of his network's Millennium Eve special ABC 2000, also known as ABC 2000 Today.

For more than two decades, Jennings was a visible fixture in many American homes every night. Along with the two other pillars of the so-called 'Big 3' -- Tom Brokaw of NBC and Dan Rather of CBS -- Jennings had, in the early 1980s, ushered in the era of the TV news anchor as lavishly compensated, globe-trotting superstar. The magnitude of a news event could be measured by whether Jennings and his counterparts on the other two networks showed up on the scene. Jennings led the rating race for a decade beginning in 1986, and had been a close second in the ratings behind Tom Brokaw and Brokaw's successor Brian Williams since then. After the departure of Brokaw from his anchor chair in December 2004, followed by Rather's retirement from the evening news in March 2005, Jennings' death brought that era to a close.

Jennings was sometimes accused of liberal bias by certain conservative groups, such as the Media Research Center. Supporters of Jennings contended that most critical reports of him consisted of inaccuracies and/or out-of-context quotes. One critic was former ABC News reporter Peter Collins, who claims Jennings rewrote his piece on the 10th anniversary of the Sandinistas to make the account more favorable to the Sandinistas.

In addition to every major world capital and war zone, Jennings also reported from all 50 states, according to the network. According to Jennings' official ABC biography, as a foreign correspondent, he was "in Berlin in the 1960s when the Berlin Wall was going up," and there again, as an anchor, "in the 1990s when it came down." He seemed to draw on that collective experience -- as well as his practiced ability to calmly describe events as they unfolded live -- not long after two hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Over the course of that day, and those that immediately followed, he would spend more than 60 hours on the air in what Tom Shales of the Washington Post, among other critics, praised as a tour de force of interviewing and explanatory broadcast journalism laced with undisguised bewilderment.

Leaving the chair

On April 5, 2005, Jennings informed viewers through a taped message that he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and was starting chemotherapy treatment the following week. (Jennings reportedly started smoking when he was 13 years old but quit in 1988, then briefly resumed following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.) Though he said he would continue to host World News Tonight when possible, this would prove to be his final broadcast. ABC News' Charles Gibson and Elizabeth Vargas served as temporary anchors until his death.

Peter Charles Jennings died after his bout with lung cancer at his home on the evening of Sunday, August 7, 2005. Married four times, he is survived by his wife, producer Kayce Freed, and his two children, Elizabeth and Christopher (who were from his third marriage to journalist Kati Marton). He had also been married to Valerie Godsoe, followed by Annie Malouf. Charles Gibson announced Jennings' death at 11:50 PM (Eastern Time) on August 7, 2005 on an ABC News special report and read his life story.

Jennings was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, having become an American citizen on May 30, 2003.

Awards

• Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award from Washington State University, 2004

• Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast from the National Press Foundation, 2000

• 14 National Emmys

• 2 George Peabody Awards

• Several Overseas Press Club Awards

• Several Alfred du Pont Columbia University Awards for Journalism

• Harvard University's Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism

• Radio and Television News Directors Paul White Award (award chosen by the news directors of all three major networks)

• National Headliner Award, 1970

• Named by the Washington Journalism Review anchor of the year three straight years.
  
  

Trivia