Philonoist.net

Journalism as we know it, as we had known it since the early 1980s, died last night, along with Peter Jennings. Jennings had been fighting lung cancer for several months, and had told his viewers about it in an April 5th episode of his show.

But you’ll hear about Jennings over the next few days. It’s the death of journalism that’s far more important, far more relevant than one man who devoted his life to it. The era of the Big Three and Nightly Network news is now gone, departed after a decade long slow crawl into the grave dug by the internet and cable. Brokaw; Rather; Jennings. The names of the men who delivered the news, will, in as little as a generation, be lost to time.

Who will we get our news from now? CNN? Fox? If you’ve been with those networks at any point since their inceptions, you know that you have to like being yelled to by twenty-two different talking heads each hour, each given 90 seconds to present their case like screaming schoolchildren fighting over a toy to be able to watch an hour of CNN or Fox.

Personally? I liked having someone sit down with me, either before, during, or after dinner, and telling me what’s happening in the world, in my country, in my neighborhood. That’s what nightly news was. It was having an old friend over, night after night.

I’m partial, of course. Who isn’t? Everyone I know picks on a mysterious mix of network and anchor. Jennings was my favorite. Some liked Rather. Others like Brokaw. It was like Coke & Pepsi & RC, really.

Towards the end, they all merged into cover stories and high-profile interviews and consumer alert specials, until you couldn’t tell one from the other. Each half-hour was exactly the same as the one being presented the next channel over, or two channels down. The networks all stole story ideas from each other. And you know what happens if you try to mix Coke and Pepsi? It tastes like garbage.

Tonight, on all three networks, they’ll spend time talking about Jennings. And maybe tomorrow too. And if Wednesday’s a slow news day, they’ll look back “one last time” on the life and career of Peter Jennings. But the news will continue on, marching foward around the globe, and so the journalists will march their weary march alongside. But soon, the networks will lose their already damaged stranglehold on evening news dominance to fresh young hip urban sophisticated faces on CNN and MSNBC and Fox. And perhaps in turn, those networks will lose to the bloggers, who will keep blogging, screaming their primal tribal yell of “Death to the mainstream media!” from all the rooftops in Monterey and Miami.

And I will sit in front of my computer screen and read the lastest RSS feed from the BBC in London and wonder who will bother to tell the bloggers that mainstream media is already dead. That journalism died last night. And a small piece of me died with it.