Recently, a reader responding to an article I'd posted about a recent Peter Jennings documentary, remarked "I have always believed in Mr. Jennings integrity..."

I don't understand how it happens, but clearly, among a subset of the American public, Peter Jennings seems to give off an air of impartiality, strong enough to override even strong evidence to the contrary.

Yet he leaves a long trail of deceit behind him, and apparently disenfranchised journalists as well. For example, in another recent article, retired reporter Peter Collins alleged:

[Peter Jennings] took a piece that I had written about the 10th anniversary of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua [in 1989] and first asked his producer to correct it for me and then he himself called me up in Managua and essentially dictated to me what I should say. Basically what Mr. Jennings wanted was for me to make a favorable pronouncement about the 10 years of the Sandinista revolution and he called me up, massaged my script in a way that I no longer recognized it.

Today, Glenn Reynolds has a letter up from yet another disenchanted ex-journalist, who also cites a lack of Jennings' objectivity as a motivation for quitting, and confirms what some of us have known or merely suspected for quite a while.

Excerpts:

I am a former reporter. I have a journalism degree. I left the business because of its drift from real reportage to advocacy and the abandonment of journalistic standards and ethics in favor of the kind of slanting and spinning we see today on the pages of the morning paper and on the evening news broadcasts. I knew it was time to find another way to make a living when I watched Peter Jennings, on a closed circuit feed to ABC affiliates, berate the American voter for Ronald Reagan's election victory over Jimmy Carter. Jennings, who was a Canadian citizen at the time, repeated that disgraceful performance in a toned down manner thenight he ascribed the Gingrich led Republicans' takeover of the House of Representatives to a temper tantrum by the voters....

One cannot be a realist without recognizing that no thinking person can report on events and issues today without having some opinions. Those opinions, however, are to be kept out of news stories, whether they appear on newspaper pages or on television and radio broadcasts. The mainstream media, unfortunately, in buying into the liberal line that the ordinary citizen is incapable of making rational, informed decisions, made a conscious decision to quit informing them and instead has chosen to engage in launching a daily propaganda barrage.

As for that "days of Lou Grant" comment, the Mary Tyler Moore show didn't come close to depicting the reality of a newsroom. The newsroom is a place of sniping and backbiting, populated by cheap shot artists fighting for inches and minutes by taking sensational angles on stories that, when presented honestly and objectively, tell themselves to willing audiences. I've been there....

Glenn also comments on the press's failure to ask meaningful tough questions of George Bush during the recent press conference. The same might be said, if not amplified, regarding Kerry's treatment.

Which is why I found this so refreshing. GMA appears to be hiding its biases better recently.