My mother watched the evening news every weekday night when I was young. She was usually good about the TV, and let my sister and I watch whatever we wanted. That included a phenomenal amount of crap. For example, it is very likely that you can tell me the plot to just about any episode of Saved By The Bell, and I will be able to tell you its ending. On my account my mother suffered through countless hours of Voltron, Star Wars, The Back to the Future Trilogy, and epic marathons of The Comedy Channel (this was before The Comedy Channel merged with competitor network HA, and started to suck. Does anybody out there remember The Higgins Boys and Gruber, or SAST, or Rich Hall’s Onion World?) My Mother was also forced to endure my sister’s The Little Mermaid phase. This was a time wherein my sister, who was very young at the time, watched the animated Disney movie ‘The Little Mermaid’, every single day. When not watching the movie she listened to the soundtrack on a little white cassette that she had up in her bedroom. During any other time of the day she could be found singing the key songs to herself, often at full volume. The entire period lasted for about a year and a half, and My Mother was extremely patient about it.

But at five O’clock my mother’s will reigned. The TV, unquestionably, found itself turned to ABC, and we all sat down and watched Peter Jennings tell us what had happened that day.

Peter Jennings WAS the news. I had no love for any anchor but him. Because of my Mother, the moment any major event exploded onto the American consciousness, it was to Peter Jennings that I turned. He gave me the word on Iran Contra, six presidential elections, hundreds of national disasters, two wars in Iraq, a recount, and everything in between. He explained to me what Chad’s were.

Every time the President opened his mouth, or anybody had a party convention, I watched it on ABC, so that I could hear what Peter Jennings had to say about it. In 2000, when he stayed up for 48 hours or whatever, I put in as many of those hours with him as I could spare. We rung in the millennium together and I wished then that we could have done it every year.

I am not writing this to eulogize him, as that has been done weeks ago, eloquently, by the friends and colleagues who knew him and worked with him. I instead want to make this point: I knew, when he died, that news would be less fun without him, and that with the absence of his unique talent and perspective I would forever be, somehow, less informed. I knew all that. But it was when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and Peter Jennings wasn’t there to tell me about it, that I realized what his being gone actually meant to me.

Charlie Gibson just isn’t the same.