12 Peter Jennings Quotes on Media

Peter Jennings quotes on media

2. There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially - sorry it's a cliche - a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.

3. There's a whole industry of conservatives saying, 'Ah, it's those damn liberals,' and a whole group of liberals saying, 'It's all those damn conservatives'... If you tailor your news viewing, as some people are now doing, so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.

7. I don't think anybody who looks carefully at us thinks that we are a left-wing or a right-wing organization.

8. We have been criticized, a little bit to my surprise, by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that.

9. Are we out of step with the administration because we do not comport completely to their political point of view?... So they criticize us for it. It goes with the territory, and if we get a groundswell we begin to look at ourselves.

10. I don't think the public realizes how much soul-searching goes on in news organizations about what is the right thing to do.

16. I think no matter what we cover, people tend to see what we cover through their own particular political or personal prisms. I always ask people to be specific what they're talking about. You can't cover the Middle East - you can't cover American politics - you can't cover America these days without finding people in one place or another taking exception to what we do. I think it goes with the territory. Keeps me, at least I hope, mindful, always that there's at least one other opinion and sometimes a dozen other opinions. And they all bear accounting for. But not everybody is right you know because somebody says, 'well you did X', and you say 'well, maybe X is right in some cases'.

18. I think sometimes in the establishment that there are a lot of people in America who resent the establishment, who resent the elite universities, who resent the large corporations and with some good reason this year - as we discovered - and who feel and who have felt prior to the advent of this sort of a great involvement of talk radio that they haven't had place to debate or even vent. And so, is Rush a deeply serious analyst and commentator? In some respects. Is he a showman as well? I think the answer is yes. But I'd never argue that he doesn't have place on the menu.

23. He seems to me like the last, best example of a tradition that had already started to vanish long before his death - the tradition of Martha Gellhorn and Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, people who went and found out what was really happening before they started to talk about it. ~ John Simpson, BBC world affairs editor

24. Inside that tall, handsome, elegant and eloquent exterior - inside that beat the heart of a fierce, but principled competitor... The last person you wanted to see coming on a story, particularly a big story, was Peter Jennings. : How much did I keep an eye on him? Constantly. All the time. ~ Dan Rather, former CBS anchor

31. A lot of Americans relied upon Peter Jennings for their news. He became a part of the life of a lot of our fellow citizens, and he will be missed. ~ George W. Bush, US President

36. The MRC's archive is packed with documentation of liberal bias from Peter Jennings, who was frequently cited in CyberAlert, but on this day after his passing we'll focus on how a couple of times he acknowledged the media's liberal tilt. ~ Media Research Center