Peter Jennings

He really did make us raise our sights.

Peter Jennings was a great man and the consummate professional. His reassuring presence will be missed by all of us.

I think sometimes in the establishment that there are a lot of people in America who resent the establishment, who resent the elite universities, who resent the large corporations and with some good reason this year — as we discovered — and who feel and who have felt prior to the advent of this sort of a great involvement of talk radio that they haven't had place to debate or even vent. And so, is Rush a deeply serious analyst and commentator? In some respects. Is he a showman as well? I think the answer is yes. But I'd never argue that he doesn't have place on the menu.

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

No one could ad lib like Peter... You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

I've always been very zealous about not invading other people's private spaces.

Peter Jennings represented all that was best in journalism and public service. A man of conscience and integrity, his reporting was a guide to all of us who aspire to better the world around us. I learned from him and was inspired by him.

Finally this evening, a brief note about change. Some of you have noticed in the last several days that I was not covering the Pope. While my colleagues at ABC did a superb job, I did think a few times I was missing out. However, as some of you now know, I have learned in the last couple of days that I have lung cancer. Yes, I was a smoker until about 20 years ago, and I was weak and I smoked over 9/11. But whatever the reason, the news does slow you down a bit. I have been reminding my colleagues today who've all been incredibly supportive that almost 10,000,000 Americans are already living with cancer, and I have a lot to learn from them. And living is the key word. The National Cancer Institute says that we are survivors from the moment of diagnosis. I will continue to do the broadcast; on good days my voice will not always be like this. Certainly it's been a long time, and I hope it goes without saying that a journalist who doesn't value deeply the audience's loyalty should be in another line of work. To be perfectly honest I'm a little surprised at the kindness today from so many people, that's not intended as false modesty, but even I was taken aback by how far and how fast news travels. Finally, I wonder if other men and women ask their doctors right away, "O.K., Doc, when does the hair go?" At any rate, that's it for now on World News Tonight. Have a good evening. I'm Peter Jennings. Thanks, and good night.

A lot of Americans relied upon Peter Jennings for their news. He became a part of the life of a lot of our fellow citizens, and he will be missed.

[President Bush should] quit hiding behind the Secret Service, come out and face the nation and explain his failure to protect the country.

The MRC's archive is packed with documentation of liberal bias from Peter Jennings, who was frequently cited in CyberAlert, but on this day after his passing we'll focus on how a couple of times he acknowledged the media's liberal tilt.

I think no matter what we cover, people tend to see what we cover through their own particular political or personal prisms. I always ask people to be specific what they're talking about. You can't cover the Middle East — you can't cover American politics — you can't cover America these days without finding people in one place or another taking exception to what we do. I think it goes with the territory. Keeps me, at least I hope, mindful, always that there's at least one other opinion and sometimes a dozen other opinions. And they all bear accounting for. But not everybody is right you know because somebody says, "well you did X", and you say "well, maybe X is right in some cases".

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'm fascinated by everything. There's just too much going on in too many places that I just daren't miss.

My dad was part of the pioneers of public broadcasting in Canada. And he always told me the most important thing you can be in your career is fair. So we all start to see a box and hope that we see the box in the same way. But you recognize in time that people see the box or they see traffic accidents in entirely different ways. So you train yourself over the years to try and give accounting to the variety... and come to some decent place in the middle. But I'm not a slave to objectivity. I'm never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people.

I was so focused on all of that, that it took me many hours, until my kids called, ironically. My kids both called and just left a little message that they were OK. And I turned around and went — Oh, man that really hit me like a ton of bricks — But most of the time we were spared that agony for the time being.

The late Peter Jennings seemed to have been born in a trench coat in an exotic locale.