Photo: Jennings defined an era in news for Americans; for them, Peter Jennings was the elegant one (Getty images).

London, UK (Monday, August 8, 2005) -- The network television anchor was always "buttoned up," every hair in place, jacket immaculate, each weekday evening -- no matter what the drama of the story he was presenting on ABC's "World News Tonight."

Even the attacks of 11 September 2001, which he presented for 60 hours that day and the horrific ones that followed, failed to overheat his on-air cool.

The single exception came last April, when he reported the lung cancer that was to kill him on Sunday at 67.

For many viewers, the fear in his eyes and the fog in his voice came as much of a shock as the news itself.

International background

Jennings was also the international one, with a special understanding of Europe, "old" and "new".

His broadcast routinely carried more foreign news than the competition and was among the reasons that ABC under his guidance came from dead last among the three broadcast networks to either top slot or a close second, where it stood when he took himself off the air.

Sensitivity to events abroad came as second nature.

He himself was technically a "foreigner" until two years ago, when he added US citizenship to his native Canadian, explaining that it resulted from personal considerations, not politics.

Unlike his competitors, Jennings also had extensive experience as a foreign correspondent, including long stints living abroad.

Defining an era

Most Americans get their news from television and Jennings' career as anchor neatly and precisely defined an era.

It began in the 1980s when Jennings at ABC, Tom Brokaw at NBC and Dan Rather at CBS took over the "face" positions in the news from a previous generation more avuncular than any of them ever became.

None achieved the "most trusted man in America" standing in the polls that had rested with CBS's Walter Cronkite.

Photo: Jennings reported on the Iraqi elections in January 2005 (AP).

Brokaw retired in the lead position last December. Rather resigned as anchor a few months later after reporting documents relating to President George W. Bush's military record that turned out to be false.

It fell to them to react to the challenges of 24-hour news.

None proved able to stem a steady drain of viewers to cable news including CNN, CNBC and Fox, and a growing array of internet news sites and blogs.

However, the three broadcast networks attract an average 25 million Americans every weekday evening and combined advertising revenues of $300 million a year.

Earning power

Ironically, falling audiences coincided with decisions at all three networks to strip their news gathering abilities. They closed most of their foreign bureaus, many in US cities, and cut back dramatically in Washington.

Peter Jennings was sensitive to foreign news

The trade-off often frustrated Jennings and his colleagues but also enriched them. He earned an estimated $10 million annually.

For context, that would translate into about 30 news producers. They are the people who do most of the gathering of the raw news product, which is then presented by correspondents and anchors.

It is also more than 15 times the salary of the executive editor of the New York Times.

Jennings was also erudite. He wrote two popular books in recent years with co-author Todd Brewster.

His earning power and erudition was a special achievement, given his background.

Not only was he born and brought up outside the country, he finished neither high school nor college.

In a US increasingly pre-occupied with "credentialing," the old, hard-knocks school of journalism is a rarity.

His gave the credit to his father, Charles Jennings, a leading figure with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In The Century, the first of his books, published in 1998, Jennings remembered his father telling him to describe the sky.

He was then instructed to go outside and describe each piece of sky, to sharpen his perceptions.

According to John Simpson -- BBC world affairs editor -- "There's a great spirit gone.

"Peter Jennings, the ABC TV news anchor who died on Monday, was probably the best in the world at his trade; but he always maintained a wry awareness that reporting, and fronting other people's reporting, for television was something pretty slight in the grand scale of things.

"Yet he took the job with great seriousness. He had been a good correspondent for ABC for years, in the Middle East and elsewhere, before he was promoted to the job of anchorman.

"Unlike most people who present the news in Europe or the United States, he also acted as an editor, going through the correspondents' scripts with immense care, and if necessary asking the teams on the ground to make changes.

"On one spectacular occasion in the early 1990s, I was watching ABC News from a hotel room somewhere in the United States when something distinctly unusual happened - the videotape of a report on, I think, the situation in the former Soviet Union broke while it was being transmitted.

"The producer cut straight to Peter in the studio, who apologized and then told us quickly and clearly what the correspondent's report was going on to say.

"I do not suppose one news presenter in 200 could do that, because they rarely even see the reports they introduce beforehand.

"But what impressed me was the ease and fluency with which Peter summed up the correspondent's points.

"I have been a broadcaster for 40 years, but I have never managed to rid myself of the awful habit of umming and erring and falling over my words when I speak. Peter could have been reading off autocue {teleprompter} -- except I knew he was not.

" 'No wonder,' I wrote to him afterwards, with the acidity of someone on a tiny fraction of his salary, 'they pay you so much.'

"Yet Peter knew the presentational aspect of television news was just candyfloss.

" 'I can't walk down the street in New York City nowadays," he said to me on one of the last times I saw him. "I have to be driven, even if it's only a couple of blocks. People just crowd round.'

"He was not being boastful; on the contrary, it was said with real regret.

" 'When I was a correspondent, nobody recognised me at all. I could go anywhere.'

"He maintained a sentimental affection for the job of the correspondent in the field. And he knew how to flatter us.

"In 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, he and his producer made the difficult journey without a cameraman. Because ABC and the BBC had recently formed an alliance, I had offered him the services of the cameraman who was working with me -- a superbly bearded South African giant called Nigel Bateson.

"As Peter and I walked across the darkened, shattered lobby of our hotel to where Nigel was standing, the broken glass crunching under our feet, he whispered to me: 'What's the cameraman's name?'

"I told him.

"Then he reached out his hand. 'Nigel,' he said, 'what superb pictures you've been getting. I watched them coming in last night.' "

"Nigel went pink with the pleasure of being praised by the best-paid man in television, and was prepared to do anything Peter wanted, forever more.

"Peter did what he could to halt the downward spiral of television news in America -- that terrible turning inward, which means the less you know about the world, the less you want to know about it, and therefore the less a ratings-obsessed industry decides to tell you.

"He often forced news items onto his programmes because they were important, not because the producers wanted them.

"He loathed the arrival of the Fox network, with its open, noisy adherence to a political agenda, and believed it would destroy the old-fashioned notion of honest and unbiased reporting forever.

"As for his own political opinions, I could never work them out. He would not tell me what he really thought about Clinton or George W Bush, and I eventually stopped asking him.

"As a Canadian, he was a bit of an outsider, though in the end he became an American citizen and was very proud of the fact.

"He was seven years older than I, but looked a good 10 years younger.

" 'I can't spend what you do on make-up,' I once said to him nastily. 'It's all just appearance,' he answered.

"Now, though, 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.

"Nowadays, most American and British writing and broadcasting about subjects like Iraq is done by people who do not go there.

"Peter Jennings did go there, and continued to go even when he knew he was dying.

" 'What brings you here?' I asked him the last time I saw him, standing outside the Convention Centre in the Green Zone in Baghdad last January.

" 'Oh, the usual. Just trying to find out what's going on.'

"That was Peter's greatest art -- or as he would have said, in his self-deprecating Canadian way, his skill. It is something which is fast disappearing."