As I mentioned before, I didn't particularly like party reporting when I was still doing it. But it had its moments. Two years ago, I went to a party at Lincoln Center celebrating Peter Jennings' 20th anniversary with ABC News. After the obligatory speeches were made and the slickly produced video homage screened, I walked over to ask the guest of honor a few questions. I was one or two questions into the interview when something strange happened: He started asking me questions. Where was I from? Where had I gone to school? Then he began telling me about some early experiences he had as a journalist, what drew him to the profession and so on, in a sort of benevolent "when I was a young journalist like you..." vein. I felt like I was in some 1950s film where the wisened old editor puts his arm around the wet-behind-the-ears junior reporter and says warmly but firmly in a bit of Runyon-esque dialog, "listen, kid, you got a lot to learn." Bill O'Reilly had yelled at me a few minutes earlier for bringing up a Slate piece in which Jack Shafer chronicled the last 20 or so times O'Reilly had told a guest on his show to shut up and while I obviously wasn't steeling myself for a similar reaction from Jennings as an interview subject, his good-natured dispensing of advice caught me off guard. It was humbling. Despite my paltry two-and-a-half years of experience in the media industry, my enormous and fragile ego prevents me from having the self-awareness to realize that I am wet-behind-the-years and could probably stand to have a few wisened editor types give me the "when I was young and stupid like you..." speech more often, even though I'm quickly approaching the "not-so-young and [still] stupid" portion of my career.
I remember telling a couple of friends later that I thought Jennings was a "really, really nice guy" and it sounds so trite, but normally when you're covering these things, you get a couple of minutes, max, to talk to people, and in this case, he kept talking well after the PR people were giving me dirty looks, my tape recorder had been turned off and he'd been reminded multiple times that "Mr. Cronkite" was waiting to speak to him. He genuinely wanted to help.
So, upon reading that Jennings died today at the age of 67, it saddens me that there's no possibility of running into him again. I would have liked to have talked to him more.
Posted by Elizabeth Spiers at August 8, 2005 12:31 AM