Peter Jennings

Peter Jennings was a Canadian journalist and news anchor. He anchored ABC's World News Tonight from 1978 to 2005, In 1961, Jennings became, with Baden Langton, the first anchors of a Canadian private national news program. The two were the first co-anchors of CTV National News. He was with the program until 1964. During his years at CTV, he covered the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, being present at the Dallas police station where Lee Harvey Oswald was held. At 26, he was and is the youngest-ever American network news anchor. He could not compete with older anchors of other networks such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. He reported from the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanese civil war. Jennings's expertise served him well, as he received notice as the ABC reporter on-scene during the Munich Olympics Massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. Returning to the US, Jennings was in a highly visible role as the news anchor on the short-lived ABC NEWS morning program "AM America," in 1976-1978 which was the forerunner to Good Morning America. Bill Beutel and Stephanie Edwards were the hosts, with Jennings providing regular news updates every 30 minutes. 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. . On December 31, 1999, 175 million people tuned into at least a portion of ABC's Millennium Eve special ABC 2000, also known as ABC 2000 Today, which Jennings anchored. Jennings conducting an interview.For more than two decades, Jennings was a presence in many American homes every night. Along with the two other pillars of the so-called "Big Three"—Tom Brokaw (NBC) and Dan Rather (CBS)—Jennings had, in the early 1980s, ushered in the era of the TV news anchor as lavishly compensated, globe-trotting star. Jennings was a frequent target of charges of "liberal bias" by certain conservative groups, such as the Media Research Center. During his career, Jennings had reported from every major world capital and war zone, and from all 50 U.S. states during their 2004 "Fifty States in Fifty Weeks" tour of World News Tonight. According to his official ABC biography, he was "in Berlin in the 1960s when the Berlin Wall was going up", and there again "in the late 1980s 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 September 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 praised as a tour de force of interviewing and explanatory broadcast journalism. On April 1, 2005, Jennings anchored World News Tonight for the last time. Jennings had been out of the anchor chair for much of the week, and didn't sound that well. Four days later, on April 5, 2005, Jennings informed viewers through a taped message that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and was starting chemotherapy treatment the following week. Jennings reportedly started smoking when he was 11 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 whenever possible, April 5 would prove to be his final broadcast. Charles Gibson announced Peter Jennings' death on August 7, 2005, with an ABC News special report that included the reading of his life story. Jennings was 67 years old. Barbara Walters gave her comments during this, as did fellow ABC anchors Diane Sawyer and Ted Koppel. Later on during the day, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and former CBS News anchor Dan Rather spoke fondly of him. In the days that followed ABC would run a number of memoriam showings saying, "The American Broadcasting Company and ABC News mourns the passing of Peter Jennings, Anchor, Reporter, Leader, Friend."