Posted By susanharrow on August 19, 2005

I adored Peter Jennings. He loved his work. He loved his colleagues. He loved his family. It showed.

On The Larry King Show tribute to Jennings they aired clips showing him diligently checking the accuracy of stories, rewriting the news he was to speak, keeping his colleagues on track–his track.

Jennings was no talking head. He wanted to control every word that came out of his mouth because he knew how important it was to communicate directly to his audience as precisely as possible. Something else I admire: he didn’t pretend he didn’t have a bias.

In fact,in a 1998 interview with NPR/Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, he said he wanted people to see his bias, notice their own and make an assessment of his interpretation the news–to think. A rarity nowadays where opinion is bandied about as fact and taken as such without so much as a thought.

Another thing I love about Jennings is something he said in that interview that I quoted in my book, Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul. I quote myself here (and please don’t take this as a riff without bias).

‘Peter Jennings anchor and senior editor of ABC TV’s World News Tonight said, “I would make for lousy soundbites. I tend to use a lot of inverted phrases and if, ands, wherefores, and maybes because that’s rather the way I look at life. And so I find writing the evening news sometimes very challenging because I realize that what we’re trying to give folks in the evening is black and white when so often I want to give them gray.”

Though I am part of this plucking, sifting, pruning and planting, this shaping into something palatable for the public, at times I mourn this process. Other times I delight in creating a hybrid when the stories are too full of weeds and have long overgrown their part of the garden. What I rebel against is when the blossom is already exquisite. Our language filtered through the media becomes an endangered species of sorts. I’ve tried to become a realist, to believe that there is a singular beauty to each version of a tale. It’s an art to convey the essence of you and your work in as few words as possible. Hone your soundbites and leave in as much gray as you can without sacrificing clarity.’

I’ve often said that taking the body of your work and ideas and creating soundbites is like taking the tome War and Peace and turning it into haiku. Jennings really understood how to take the complex and hone it into the understandable while not dumbing it down. Do you?

If you like send in some examples of soundbites that have been effective for you. Love to hear them.

Category: Celebrities & The Media, Media Appearances, Sound Bites
Tags: Larry King, Peter Jennings, Susan Harrow