Peter Jennings is dead

Peter Jen­nings has died. For some rea­son, when I would think of him I’d think of that old skit (was it SNL?) where you had to guess if some­one was dead or Cana­dian. He was my favorite no-really-he-is-Canadian person.

I am actu­ally pretty sad­dened by his death. He was the one tele­vi­sion news jour­nal­ist we always turned to when we needed the straight story. We watched all the recent Big News sto­ries with him. We turned to ABC dur­ing 9/11. We watched him dur­ing the elec­tions. Frankly, we trusted him, as old and tired as that cliche is. I liked Tom Brokaw, but never really liked his news deliv­ery, and Dan Rather was not on my radar. But now they have all gone, and it really is a new era.

Can I even name their replace­ments? I don’t think so. Not sur­pris­ingly, I can’t name many of the news per­son­al­i­ties on TV. I get my news from the Inter­net. All of it. Sure, we get a week­end paper, but we read it mostly for the local sto­ries and the ads.

And yet. There are still times when live TV news is the best way to stay in touch, and now I don’t know where I’ll turn.

Good­bye, Mr. Jen­nings. I miss you already.