PJ Says Goodnight for the Last Time

[Elspode]

Peter Jennings has died from lung cancer at the age of 67. Only a scant couple of months ago, he announced on the ABC Evening News that he would be going on hiatus to receive treatment, and that he would appear sporadically as he was able.

Apparently, his condition was much more grave than he let on. This was an uncharteristically unshared detail for the man who I consider to have been the finest television news anchorman of the past twenty years. Listening to PJ tell us about the ills of the world was always somehow more comforting, more carefully spoken, more palatable than the other guys for me. PJ was an up front guy who loved to be where the news was being made, not reading rewritten scripts from a news wire while narrating someone else's visuals.

Peter Jennings positively exuded class, from his undoubtedly expensive suits to his perfectly coiffed hair and Hollywood star perfect teeth. And, for all that class, when you saw him with his sleeves rolled up, in the field, you knew that this was exactly where he thrived; it was precisely what he was born to do.

Whenever there was a crisis in the world, it was ABC to which I turned. Even in his absence, ABC retained the "ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings" title, honoring the man who we hoped would soon return to both inform and...somehow...reassure us.

I am very much going to miss Peter Jennings. The broadcast news industry has lost its best active practitioner, and I've lost a trusted voice in a very scary world.