RIP Peter Jennings

This has been sitting and waiting to be posted and now it's finally done so I apologize for lateness and untimeliness of this. It seems that these days my ignorance in all things Canadian is being shoved in my face. I only regret that I found out this information after he had passed on.

But when I did find it out I thought I was on the other side of the looking glass. I mean, wasn't Peter Jennings the face of American television? The CNN "dude"? Now, I don't watch CNN so I wouldn't know if he mentioned his roots or not but this came as such a shock to me. At the same time, why go work for the US? Yes, that's where the jobs and the money were but then it's as if you're reporting on a forein country for a foreign country. Now the US isn't exactly foreign but they do things differently there.

His father, Charles Jennings, was the "most prominent announcer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)". Now personally, I think the CBC has the greatest news radio in the world, the BBC having the greatest news tv in the world.
So of course, Charles' son had to do him one better and become the youngest ABC Evening News anchor at the age of 27. I think it would have been better if he'd stayed with CBC but ABC offered him the job so...

The other nightly news anchors from CBS and NBC were Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, the big pitch hitters of anchordom... the anchorites... they were really great news anchors. Jennings left the anchor desk in 1968 and was sent to Rome to become a foreign correspondent. One of his accomplishments was establishing the first American television news bureau in the Middle East. He stayed there and served for seven years as ABC News Bureau Chief in Beirut, Lebanon.

So because he played niced, Jennings was put back in an anchor position for A.M. America, where he delivered five-minute newscasts from Washington. Everybody kept saying how he was a great foreign correspondent when he was in the US because he delivered a perspective of seeing every issue from the outside, originally being Canadian.

I never watched ABC news and I didn't know Mr. Jennings well but from what I've read and from the number of news personalities that attended his funeral, I would say he was a great reporter and a great Canadian. Mr. Jennings we will miss you.