Remembering Peter: Honor Jennings With More Foreign Reporting On TV

About six months ago, Jonathan Alter saw Peter Jennings at a party. He asked when WNT would regain the ratings lead over Nightly News (since Tom Brokaw had recently stepped down). Jennings was blunt.

“We’ll never catch them,” he said. Alter picks up the story on Newsweek.com: “Jennings explained that he had lost his lead during the 1994 O.J. Simpson case, when he refused to air nearly as many O.J. stories as the competition. He still went lighter on tabloid stories and heavier on foreign news, he said, and thus would never be number one again.“

But forget about Nielsen, Alter says. “People in television news who want to honor him should do so by resolving to include more foreign reporting in their broadcasts, even if it means lower ratings.”