"I don't think a reporter should give advice or make predictions"
About this Quote
A reporter who hands out advice stops being a reporter and starts auditioning for the role of oracle. Peter Jennings, the calm baritone of network news at its late-20th-century peak, is drawing a bright line between witness and participant. The sentence is almost aggressively modest, but the modesty is strategic: it’s a defense of credibility in an industry where authority is the product.
The intent is practical. Advice implies a relationship of trust that can’t survive undisclosed assumptions; predictions tempt a journalist into cherry-picking facts that flatter their forecast. Jennings is warning against the gravitational pull of punditry, where certainty is a performance and being wrong rarely has consequences. In his formulation, the reporter’s job is to reduce the public’s informational disadvantage, not to decide what the public should do with the information.
The subtext is also self-protective. In the era Jennings came to define, anchors were branded as impartial arbiters, even as ratings, political access, and corporate pressures pressed on every editorial decision. “No predictions” isn’t just epistemic humility; it’s a way to keep the newsroom from becoming another arm of political strategy or market psychology. It’s an ethic that treats the future as a lobbying target and refuses to join the campaign.
Read now, the line sounds almost radical. Contemporary news rewards hot takes, “what it means” segments, and probabilistic theater. Jennings is insisting that the most responsible stance can be restraint: tell us what happened, verify it hard, and let the audience keep its own agency.
The intent is practical. Advice implies a relationship of trust that can’t survive undisclosed assumptions; predictions tempt a journalist into cherry-picking facts that flatter their forecast. Jennings is warning against the gravitational pull of punditry, where certainty is a performance and being wrong rarely has consequences. In his formulation, the reporter’s job is to reduce the public’s informational disadvantage, not to decide what the public should do with the information.
The subtext is also self-protective. In the era Jennings came to define, anchors were branded as impartial arbiters, even as ratings, political access, and corporate pressures pressed on every editorial decision. “No predictions” isn’t just epistemic humility; it’s a way to keep the newsroom from becoming another arm of political strategy or market psychology. It’s an ethic that treats the future as a lobbying target and refuses to join the campaign.
Read now, the line sounds almost radical. Contemporary news rewards hot takes, “what it means” segments, and probabilistic theater. Jennings is insisting that the most responsible stance can be restraint: tell us what happened, verify it hard, and let the audience keep its own agency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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