Education Quote by Peter Jennings

A career built on “just the facts” rarely survives on facts alone; it survives on defaults. Peter Jennings’ line admits, with a kind of newsroom candor, that conventional wisdom is both a trap and a tool. “Shied away” signals instinctive skepticism, the reporter’s reflex to flinch from storylines that arrive prepackaged: the easy villain, the tidy narrative arc, the poll-tested “what America thinks.” Yet the second clause pivots hard: “though I know the power of it.” That’s not a surrender so much as a confession of professional reality. Conventional wisdom is sticky because it organizes chaos quickly, and TV news runs on speed, clarity, and shared assumptions. If you want to reach millions at 6:30, you can’t build every segment from first principles.

The subtext is Jennings describing the tightrope of mainstream journalism in the late 20th century: the aspiration to independence inside a system that rewards legibility. Conventional wisdom can set the agenda before any reporting begins, telling audiences what matters and telling journalists what will “make sense” on air. Knowing its power means recognizing how it shapes not just public opinion but the frame through which events are perceived - wars, elections, scandals - long before evidence gets its day.

Jennings isn’t posturing as an iconoclast. He’s marking the difference between contrarianism and judgment. The best journalists don’t reflexively oppose the crowd; they understand the crowd’s narrative gravity, then decide when to resist it and when to harness it to explain something true.