9 Peter Jennings Quotes on News

Peter Jennings quotes on news

1. Good evening. We begin tonight...

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.

6. I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didn't learn something, and if there is a born-again quality to me, that's it.

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

13. On 9/11, those of us who do the jobs that I do, flew without a net for hour and hour and hour after end. And then you hope and pray that you've had the experience to be up to it. Because then you're editor, analyst, reporter, correspondent, ringmaster, the whole thing.

15. I was so focused on all of that, that it took me many hours, until my kids called, ironically. My kids both called and just left a little message that they were OK. And I turned around and went - Oh, man that really hit me like a ton of bricks - But most of the time we were spared that agony for the time being.

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'.

21. I'm fascinated by everything. There's just too much going on in too many places that I just daren't miss.