Peter Jennings

Edward R. Murrow Awards Ceremony

Peter Jennings gives remarks after accepting the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast on October 4, 2004, in New York. Peter Jennings was the anchor and senior editor of ABC's World News Tonight.

Age has its liabilities, one of which is to have something to say tonight. Could I just say first of all that vanity has no place here this evening, but having followed Kelly [Wallace], Barbara [Cochran] and Bob [Woodruff], could you just loosen up the camera a little bit….

I also want to say a special thanks to RTNDA. We have all been together before and it is something that I think those of us who get recognized by all of you who come from such diverse backgrounds and different places around the country…it is very important to anyone who gets an RTNDA award.

I have been asked to say a few words. I work for a new organization that reaches roughly 200 million Americans every month on television, on the radio and through the Internet, and I take this and I realize have never stopped being grateful to them for putting up with me for this long.

When asked to say something briefly, I'm mindful of two things. A, to be brief, but also that we have a keynote speaker tonight in Tom [Brokaw], and I'm looking forward to hearing him. Nothing better than hearing a guy who has a little less liability.

I must say, it's a relief for Dan [Rather] and me, and maybe even Tom, that we don't have to say goodbye one more time. We have been at a series of dinners which have had both an effect on our girth and our good manners toward each other as we say goodbye to Tom day after day after day. And I don't even think he's going very far away.

I think about the evening news and the universe in which it exists. I recognize and respect the right of everyone to opine about it, and the people in my own shop know I'm not without opinion. It's true I think we do not cover the world as well as we should. And it's not one of the struggles I am winning, and that's for a longer discussion.

And yes, our audiences have declined quite dramatically in the last couple of decades, but I think that's only natural given that we live in a universe with vastly more choices and opportunities.

I am not, I think, as my immediate colleagues know, a cheerleader for the sake of it. But I do see the scope of what we all cover on the evening news, the intelligence of our reporters and producers, and the context we strive to provide, and I'm really proud.

And I am no whiz at statistics, but I do know that World News Tonight reaches five times the audience of all the cables combined on a daily basis, so if you put the three of us together, there is some reason to believe the evening news is not quite as irrelevant as some people would wish it to be.

What I do think is unfortunate, and I hope it doesn't sound too pompous to say it—not so much for World News Tonight but for the entire country—is that many people seem to have decided to tailor their consumption of news to fit their political or social bias.

We all have biases. God knows I do. But I am less inclined to cling to them quite as assiduously when I make an effort to hear other points of view. And please don't automatically take that as a comment on Fox. They do some excellent, provocative, interesting reporting.

And whatever people say about the liberal media—whatever that actually means—and whatever people say about Dan [Rather], some of which seems to me to be unnecessarily cruel and ugly, in 40 years the evening news has never been driven by ideology. And boy, do I recognize ideology when I see it.

Finally, I want to thank the people who never get enough credit for their roles on the evening news. One, anyone serving in Iraq. Anyone. Anyone holding a camera or sound equipment. People who take risks that people in the home office rarely understand and do not always appreciate. And specifically, I want to mention the ABC News cameramen and -women in Europe who have been in and out of dangerous situations for as long as I can remember, occasionally dragging me with them but more often than not without me.

Videotape editors and all the people who still, even as technology changes, in the blink of an eye get our reports into our broadcasts from some strange place we hadn't heard of the day before at the very last minute.

And if I may be in this once instance personal, those other editors and producers on West 66th Street, who never tire of jumping in to remind me of one more thing we can try, of one more idea to consider, one more way we could improve on the evening broadcast.

This is and always has been a collaborative effort. Barbara Cochran, I thank the RTNDA very profoundly for recognizing this. Thank you all.

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