How Peter Jennings Changed Network TV News

Anchorman Peter Jennings was the face of ABC News for two decades until his death from cancer.

In this 2007 interview Jennings’s fourth wife Kayce and his former ABC News colleague Lynn Sherr tell Peter’s story.
Get your copy of Peter Jennings: A Reporter s Life by Kayce Jennings & Lynn SherrAs an Amazon Associate, Now I've Heard Everything earns from qualifying purchases.

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What people didn't see is how much work he put into it.
They didn't see what happened when he went home at night and
kept working. They didn't see when he got up
early in the morning and read 5 papers.
Peter Jennings, widow Casey Jennings and ABC correspondent
Will Scherr today. Now I've heard everything.

(00:20):
I'm Bill Thompson. A couple of decades ago, this
was before the Internet became the place where most people got
their news. Network television news was
king, and there was fierce and spirited competition among the
Big Three, each of whom had an Anchorman with a long and

(00:40):
distinguished journalism career.CBS had Dan Rather, who had
succeeded the legendary Walter Cronkite.
NBC had Tom Brokaw, who had succeeded John Chancellor, and
ABC had Peter Jennings, the longtime domestic and foreign
correspondent who proved himselfover the years and who was
elevated to the anchor desk in 1983.

(01:03):
Now the three of them had years of competition until the early
2000s when Dan Rather retired, Tom Brokaw retired and then
cancer took the life of Peter Jennings.
He was just 67 and it was the end of an era in TV news.
Now in 2007, Jennings fourth wife Casey, along with his one

(01:26):
time ABC News colleague Lynn Scherr, put together a book that
they called Peter Jennings A Reporter's Life Now.
The three of us met one afternoon in the fall of 2007 to
talk about the book In just a moment.
Our conversation. Here's one that'll bring back
some memories. One of the more than 10,000
interviews in the 30 year archive of national radio

(01:48):
personality Bill Thompson. Enjoy.
So here now from 2007, Casey Jennings and Lynn Sure.
Peter Jennings never had the opportunity to write a memoir,
and so we've done it for him and.

(02:08):
I suspect he never would have, so even better, we did it for
him. But there's I think it's the
best kind of memoir and it's thebest kind of way to tell Peter's
story at this point because it is the recollections of the
people who knew him best, his family, his close friends, his
colleagues. Casey, is this a book you had to
be kind of coaxed into doing? Yes, although I would say that

(02:32):
Lynn went so far as to coax me. She had a really good idea,
which I didn't buy into for about a year, and when I finally
did, it was because I saw what Lynn saw, that these were the
interviews that we compiled it to create.
The narrative of this book are really remarkable in their

(02:53):
honesty and their rawness and their in their ability to
capture Peter and capture his life and his life was an
incredible adventure. And to be able to take people
along on the ride seemed in the end worth it because there are a
lot of values that are well worth exploring, both
journalistic and human, that arerepresented in that.

(03:14):
What struck me from the first page was how these these went
beyond the platitudes that people usually give when someone
has passed this. Wow, what a great guy.
He was terrific. Oh, we all loved.
These are very specific and veryconcrete and very consistent
recollections all across the board.
I think that's one of the thingsthat struck us most was that

(03:36):
there were 81 interviews conducted right after Peter
Jennings died in August of 2005.And among those 81, there is
more consistency and they're more of the same kinds of
stories. Not the same exact story,
because everyone had a differentexperience with Peter, but
they're connected by a bond because he was a very consistent

(03:59):
human being and a lot of people saw the same thing.
So on the one hand, it was wonderful to see so many people
feeling and saying the same thing about him.
On the other, keep in mind most of these 81 people that were
interviewed for the original TV special and now that have been
included in this book, most of these people are storytellers by

(04:21):
profession. These are extremely gifted
storytellers, talented people who are articulate, who know how
to put their finger on exactly what they're seeing and feeling
and hearing. So it's an unusually precise
array of stories about one man. It is.

(04:42):
Extraordinary that this is a manthat didn't even finish high
school. Yet I gather that.
The grounding that he got at home in what it means to be a
good journalist probably served him as well or better than if
he'd gotten the finest college education.
I think twofold. I think that's certainly true.
His father was a very renowned, was a renowned Canadian

(05:03):
broadcaster and Peter sort of learned at his knee.
There's a wonderful story where Peter is.
It was a young journalist and his father said to him, come
outside, look at the sky. And Peter looked at the sky and
his father said OK now describe it for me.
And Peter did. And then his father said OK now
look again. Divide it into 8 pieces.

(05:24):
Describe each piece. And I think we saw the ability
to be so descriptive and to tella story as well as Peter told.
It probably stemmed from some ofthat.
On the other hand, I think school had nothing to do with
Peter's ability to be a great journalist.
I think it was in his DNA, it was in his blood.
It was about curiosity, it was about interest, it was about

(05:47):
adventure. It was about just wanting to
know and wanting to learn and never being able to get enough.
If there is such a thing as a born journalist, I think Peter
Jennings was a born journalist. Without question, he would have
been a reporter whatever he actually did with his life.
I mean, that's how he lived his life.

(06:09):
That's how he lived his private life.
It's how he walked down the street.
It's how he was in a world whereno one knew what he did.
It's just who he was. But but keep in mind I agree
with Casey. Peter was a born journalist, but
he had to work very hard to get there.
It didn't just come upon him because his father was a famous

(06:30):
reporter, blah, blah, blah. Yes, he got his foot in the door
initially because of his dad. But when Peter got to New York,
got to the United States. Peter, after all, was born in
Canada when he was discovered bythe American Broadcasting
Company and brought to the United States at the tender age
of 26 and made the anchor of a 15 minute network news program

(06:53):
called the ABC Evening News. I think the the news with Peter
Jennings or something. He was a colossal failure.
He was a flop. He wasn't old and he knew it.
He wasn't old enough. He wasn't he wasn't experienced
enough. So Peter, who was or wasn't a
decent reporter at that point inhis life, then made it his
business to go out and learn to be a really fabulous reporter

(07:14):
and get the experience that he knew that he needed to climb up
in the world. And he became a truly wonderful
reporter. He became a reporter who
understood that it wasn't about him, it was about the news, and
it wasn't about who was telling people the news.
It was about the people to whom he was telling the news, and

(07:35):
that was eminently clear throughout his career.
I was going to add, because he did become a truly great
reporter, he also became a trulygreat communicator and Peter
understood that communicating was as important and he worked
very, very hard at communicating.
When he did a narration, most people go into a little booth

(07:55):
and read a narration. Peter refused to do that.
He read his narration in the edit room where he could see the
picture, and he did it over and over and over again.
Even at the end of his life, he would re what we call track,
retrack, re narrate, re narrate,re narrate, and then he'd see
the piece and he'd do it again because he wasn't happy.

(08:16):
He took communication as well asreporting very seriously because
of his respect for his audience,I think.
Well, I have to tell you that the amount of homework that he
did made it very intimidating for me to prepare for this
interview because I wanted to dothat much homework.
I mean I've I could not have done this had I not.
Read that book thoroughly. Because it would have been doing
him a disservice. It's true he worked

(08:37):
extraordinarily hard and was very demanding of himself and,
as is clear in the book, hugely demanding of others, which
didn't always make them happy. But he really expected
intellectual rigor in himself and in others, and expected the
reporters who worked with him tobe as excited about what he they
were doing as he was, and as rigorous.

(08:58):
And Lynn, you experienced this with him on the day the
Challenger explosion. I did.
When Challenger blew up, I was in California and with what my
husband used to refer to as the entire A-Team of American space
coverage. We were all that to cover a
robotic flyby of the planet Uranus, one of the Voyagers, and

(09:20):
we were not at the Cape for thatlift off of the space shuttle.
I immediately went into the Los Angeles Bureau and of course was
on the air all day for however many 891011 hours that we were
on the air. Peter was in Washington.
He had come down to Washington for the State of the Union and
for a briefing with President Reagan and all of the reporters
at the briefing with President Reagan immediately went back to

(09:42):
the bureaus. Peter went, you know, slid right
into the anchor seat and kept going.
I knew that Peter didn't know that much about the space
program. He knew a little bit and he was
number no dope, but he didn't have the, you know, the inside
info. And during all the time we were
on the air, he would ask me questions and they were always
good questions and I would answer.

(10:03):
And I discovered to my delight that he actually listened to the
answer. And, and once he heard the
answer, he would then pose another question based on what
he had just heard. So he wasn't just going through
the motions. He was actually conducting a
real interview with me, his friend, his colleague.
In that case, I was the expert, but he wanted, he was pulling

(10:25):
the information out of me, feeding it into his brain, and
then making his anchorship, if you will, a better thing for
that. And it was it.
That was the moment. I always had great respect for
Peter, but that was the moment Iknew this is truly a man who
understands what anchoring is, which is, as you know, very
different from just being a reporter.

(10:46):
After this short break, Casey Jennings and Lynn Scherr spilled
little tea about Peter Jennings.You know, AI is not just for 22
year old coders. A lot of us older adults are
drawing on our life experience to find unique and creative ways
to use AI at home or at work. Got an AI success story you'd

(11:08):
like to share? Tap the link below to visit our
YouTube channel, AI After 40 andLet's keep learning together.
Now back to my 2007 conversationwith Casey Jennings and Lynn
Sherd. And woe to the reporter who was
in any way unprepared. Oh yeah, Peter smartly,

(11:32):
correctly, wisely didn't didn't suffer fools.
Particularly not other journalistic fools.
But. It should be pointed.
Out there was That wasn't because of an ego like how dare
you come into my presence and beunprepared.
It was he was saying that on on behalf of the millions of people
he was serving. How dare you come into their
presence unprepared? Well, remember, Peter believed
very strongly this was a public service, that to be a journalist

(11:53):
is a public service and you serve the viewer.
And you're exactly right. How dare you not be prepared?
If you can be, there are times you can't be, then your job is
to learn as much and as intelligently as possible and be
able to have the skills to then relate that to your viewer.
But if you have any opportunity to be prepared, you should be.
Let's not keep going without suggesting Peter was not a St.

(12:20):
We're not here to canonize him. He had some annoying, shall we
say, behaviorisms, and he did some things that made you want
to ring a sweet little neck fromtime to time.
And Casey often makes the point,and I think she's quite right,
that Peter was no more demandingof other people than he was of
himself. But he would sometimes run you

(12:42):
through the hoops on something. And you've got the feeling every
now and then he was sort of exercising a certain, well,
let's see how far we can go on this.
And he also had that irritating sort of anchor habit of stealing
your lead. So you'd write this wonderful
piece to go on the air and it would get to Peter's desk and

(13:04):
somehow the lead would disappearand the word would get back.
Would you mind starting with thesecond paragraph instead of the
1st? And you would find your
wonderfully crafted sentence coming out of Peter's mouth
later on. But he wasn't.
Stupid he didn't steal the bad lines.
Well, I mean you, you can't get very far in this business
without having an ego. I mean that that is going to

(13:25):
feed your ambition. Well, I think there's no doubt
that Peter knew he was good at what he did.
He was also, you know, there wasan insecurity about it, which is
why he worked so hard. I mean, what people didn't see
is how much work he put into it.They didn't see what happened
when he went home at night and kept working.
They didn't see when he got up early in the morning and read 5

(13:46):
papers and went on the Internet to read things and listen to NPR
and all of that. It's.
Almost like being a cop. You're never not a cop.
Well, you know, you know the scene in broadcast news where
where the guy is on the air and the producers back in the
control room and he's got an earpiece on and she's saying the
words and all the words are coming out of his mouth.

(14:07):
This was not Peter Jennings and in fairness, it nor was it Tom
Brokaw, nor was it Dan Rather. I mean, these were three
extraordinarily experienced reporters who became anchors.
And I'm not going to sit here and name names.
I I will also say it's certainlynot true of Charlie Gibson.
I mean, we've got, we've been, we've got a great man there at
this moment. But Peter wasn't someone who

(14:30):
mouthed what someone else told him to say.
Peter didn't always have time towrite every single word that
came out of his mouth when he anchored World News, but he
either rewrote or wrote most of it most of the time, and it was
always about him. Sometimes on the air he was
rewriting, often on the air. Because.

(14:52):
Well, could be for any number ofreasons, but often times he just
didn't think it was good enough.Also though, he not only didn't
mouth the words coming through his earpiece at him, he was also
often times directing his director.
So he was not only changing the script, reading the copy,
interviewing correspondence, he was telling the director what he

(15:13):
wanted to see and what he wantedus to see.
There is a passage in the book, and forgive me, I don't.
Remember who? Whose recollection it was that
they said that he was basically offered that their job was to
give him a menu from which he would then choose what what he
was going to do. And they didn't know quite know
which button to push because they didn't know which
correspondent he was going to goto at that point.
Well, there's a wonderful a quote in the book also.

(15:35):
And of course everything, as youknow, is is based on is from
interviews with other people. There is a narrative through it,
and we sort of think of it as a conversation with Peter Jennings
about Peter Jennings because Peter's voice is in there also.
It's his, it's his kind of storytelling.
But the the fellow who ran the audio board at ABC News talks
about the fact that when Peter was on the air on one of those

(15:58):
breaking stories, there were maybe 5 to 10 or a dozen
correspondents in the field. And at any moment Peter could go
to any one of them to ask a question.
And the audio guy's responsibility, as you well
know, was to make sure that the correspondence mic is open so
that when he starts to talk, he and he never know where Peter
was going was going. But he developed a relationship

(16:21):
with Peter where he could figureout his body language and he
could figure out who he was going to talk to.
And sometimes Peter would cue him and sometimes Peter would,
you know, cue him by way of saying, let me now go to Lynn
Schurr and see what she thinks. That was a good cue.
Normally it would be, you know, ladies and gentlemen, we're
really worried about this. And I'm really wondering,
Lyncher, what do you think about?
And, and, and then the audio guy's responsibility was to get

(16:43):
my mic open so they'd get that pot open and.
Not too soon because they don't want to catch you.
It's like, when's he going to goto me?
Yes, exactly right. And it's an art form.
And you. Don't like to keep everything
fresh. He wanted everyone on their toes
and he wanted absolute spontaneity.
If he if Lynn had said somethingthat, you know, that taught him
something new and made him want to go to Sam Donaldson at the
White House, he wanted to do that.

(17:05):
He didn't want to have to plan it.
He wanted to be fresh. He wanted to be spontaneous.
He wanted to go where the story took him and insisted on that.
And the people who worked with him had to learn to go with it.
And they thrived on it, and theydid it very well.
You know, Casey talked about Peter also directing while he
was on the air. And you can anytime you see a
clip of Peter doing a live broadcast of a breaking story,

(17:28):
you can see it. You can tell because he would
say, for instance, in the 9/11 coverage, at one point the
picture of the towers this, thatand the other and you hear
Peter, Peter saying look at that, look at that, whatever,
whatever. And then he says let's, let's
just keep that picture there forjust a few minutes longer while
I took what that is, is telling,telling the director what to do.

(17:49):
He's directing the director. In most shops, the director is
in the control room putting up the pictures that he thinks, or
she thinks goes with the story. In this case, Peter was saying
what he wanted on the air in. Fact, had the director come back
to him, you might have heard, asPeter did sometimes, to say.
Now, Roger, will you go back to the pictures of nine of the

(18:11):
towers? Let's stay with the towers for a
while. Peter was actually one of the
first I I remember thinking this.
Peter was one of the first guys on the air to try to breakdown
that invisible wall between the viewers and the studio.
For years, television was magic.It was simply magic.

(18:31):
People knew they could push a button and they could get
something. And you weren't supposed to know
how the sausages were made. You weren't supposed to know
there were 90 million people in the background screaming and
yelling and doing this. And Peter very early on, would
say things like, in case you're interested, the way we got that
picture is this happened. And for him to say, Roger, Roger
Goodman, the director who's alsoin the book, Roger, let's do

(18:54):
this. That's Peter talking to Roger
and letting the audience in on the fact that he, Peter, is
asking for something. I once did a thing for an
election where I was in a, a virtual studio.
It was a bunch of years ago. It was one of our first forays
with virtual reality where I'm standing in a room a a teeny
little weeny cubicle of a room and they had projected stuff.
It looked as if I was in an immense room with stuff going

(19:16):
on. At the end of the broadcast,
Peter said, Lynn, come on out onthe floor and I I came out.
It was the end of the election. And he said, I want to show
everybody what it is. And he said, this is what you
look like now. You saw all the gimmicks.
He said, now let's see it, Roger, He said to the director,
let's see it. Without that.
They took I'm standing in a roomand it was like the emperor
without clothes on, although it was, you know, much more modest

(19:37):
than that. And I would at first was a
little shocked. And I thought we're in the
illusion business. We're trying to give people a
little magic. And Peter understood that the
country was moving to UP or the world was moving to a point
where they wanted to know what was going on.
And it was, it was extraordinaryto me.

(20:00):
And I suspect no one knew that was coming that night.
I suspect Peter just suddenly had this idea that he was this
neat stuff that they were doing.Let the audience in on it.
Let him see. Just and we're his friend.
Why not? I think that's right.
He he was talking to us. You can get your copy of Peter
Jennings, A Reporter's Life by Casey Jennings and Lynn Sure by

(20:22):
tapping the link in our show notes by clicking the link in
the description below. If you're watching this on
YouTube or by going to our website heardeverything.com, we
may earn an Amazon Commission ifyou make a purchase.
Heard everything.com is where you can also find my 1987
conversation with Peter Jenningslong time ABC colleague Sam
Donaldson. For some reason, some people

(20:43):
believe that when someone's elected president, they ought to
be above the type of tough, blunt questioning that they
applaud when it comes to the mayor and his brother.
Who's got the sewer contract andwhy is that?
Well, I don't believe that. And my 1994 conversation with CB
S S Dan Rather. A good reporter must be
skeptical. Cynicism is something completely

(21:06):
different. I can truthfully say that while
I've made a lot of mistakes, becoming a cynic is not one of
them. And of course, we post new
episodes of Now I've Heard Everything every Monday,
Wednesday and Friday. And you can find us wherever you
find podcasts. Thank you so much for listening.
Next time on NOW I've Heard Everything.
He's the adopted son of AUS president.
He was a radio talk show host, aconservative talk show host, and

(21:29):
he's an advocate for adoptees. My 2004 conversation with
Michael Reagan. When we do television shows
about children, we do televisionshows about the children of
other countries. When was the last time you saw a
television show about the children in this country wanting
to be adopted? You never.
See it? That's next time.
Now I've heard everything. And Bill Thompson.