Peter Jennings: Peter Jennings, who has died at the age of 67, had one notable advantage over rival American television news presenters. He was a Canadian and, during his 40-year career with the ABC network, brought a quiet but firm air of detachment to hundreds of reports from the world's hot spots.
Where Dan Rather at CBS and Tom Brokaw at NBC tended to wave the flag in moments of national tension, Jennings held firmly to a low-key Reithian tradition. It did not always win him friends within the US establishment but, at his peak in the early 1990s, Jennings managed to pull in an audience well ahead of his competitors. He averaged 14 million viewers nightly.
Although he vigorously rejected all accusations of bias, Jennings acknowledged that his Canadian upbringing had generated a broadly sceptical view of Canada's giant southern neighbour. He once defined his job as "to question the behaviour of government officials on behalf of the public", a seemingly anodyne First Amendment formula that has little appeal to official Washington.
It meant that Jennings ran into periodic political storms over such issues as Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba and, most recently, over his presumed view of the war in Iraq. His affection for his adopted nation remained undimmed.
He was born to broadcast. His father, Charles, was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's leading radio announcer, a position which made him almost the voice of the nation during the second World War. His son was allowed, at the age of nine, to host a Saturday morning children's show, Peter's Programme, on Canada's national network, and he barely looked back. He acknowledged that, as a consequence, his formal education had been abysmal, and, anyway, he cut it short at the age of 17 to become a disc jockey and news reporter at a small radio station in Ontario.
His career took off after he gave CBC a graphic live report of a serious local train crash, a coup which brought him a job offer from CTV, Canada's first independent television network. At the age of 24 Jennings quickly gained a national reputation as the presenter of CTV's main evening bulletin.
The easy manner of his on-air performances and his matinee idol appearance attracted the attention of ABC News in New York in 1964, and it poached him to front its own 15-minute nightly news segment. Jennings was an instant success and, within a year, had been promoted to be the network's principal news anchor.
In the fierce battle for the American television audience, this pitted him against such well-established rivals as CBS's Walter Cronkite (then deemed "the most trusted man in America"), and NBC's formidable duo, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley.
As the years rolled by, there were few major events that Jennings did not witness. He saw the Berlin Wall go up in 1961 and was there when it came down in 1989. He watched the unravelling of eastern European communism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the rise of global terrorism. His reports brought him numerous awards, including 16 Emmys.
Jennings's most stunning contribution was on September 11th, 2001, when he was the face on screen during the events of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. In April this year he revealed to viewers that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He said he had quit smoking 20 years earlier, but had returned to it at the time of 9/11.
He added that he hoped to return to his job after chemotherapy treatment. His condition, however, worsened steadily and he was never able to present the news again.
Peter Charles Jennings: born July 29th, 1938; died August 7th, 2005