Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Preview

Aliens and the anchor desk

Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs - Seeing Is Believing; 8-10 tonight, WFTS-Ch. 28

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published February 24, 2005

With networks down to the last of the old guard of evening news anchors, one might expect a bit of reverence for the man in the chair.

Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight anchor, is the link to the days before the Internet, before bloggers, before the explosion of cable news outlets, when network news was king.

Tom Brokaw, the face of NBC Nightly News for 21 years, stepped down in December. Next month, Dan Rather gives up his chair of 24 years at CBS Evening News.

That's why it's sad to see Jennings headlining ABC's Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs - Seeing Is Believing, a two-hour special that airs tonight on WFTS-Ch. 28.

Are lights in the sky the only way left for a network news anchor to grab viewers' attention?

With breathless accounts of a "bright light," "beings" and "sightings," the special can't reveal anything more than that lots of people think they have seen spaceships.

Or perhaps it can.

Perhaps it illustrates the new status of a network news anchor.

"As a journalist, I began this project with a healthy dose of skepticism and as open a mind as possible," Jennings said in an ABC news release, putting a happy face on a weird situation. "After almost 150 interviews with scientists, investigators and with many of those who claim to have witnessed unidentified flying objects, there are important questions that have not been completely answered - and a great deal not fully explained."

The full show wasn't completed in time for critics to review, although ABC did send a rough cut of the first half.

Half the show is sad enough, unless Jennings surprises us and springs an interview with an actual alien.

Chase Squires can be reached at 727 893-8739 or squires@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 24, 2005, 00:53:06]