Peter Jennings 1938 - 2005 - UPDATE

When I grew up, I rarely watched the NBCNEWS and CBSNEWS mainly because they are not captioned. Peter Jennings and his ABCNEWS was the first national news that has the 30-minute captioning for Deaf people and others who needed to read in order to follow up with the current events.

By leaping the giant step in live captioning, it became a model for others to follow up the stanrdards. CNN, Headline News, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNBC, CBSNEWS and NBCNEWS plus hundreds of local TV stations are now captioned. It is not an option, it is a requirement.

Peter Jennings was heavy smoker, he died of Lung Cancer at 67.

An interesting tidbit about Peter Jennings' ABCNEWS during his tenure, Greg Hlibok, one of four Deaf President Now Movement leaders at Gallaudet, was the first Deaf person to be named on ABCNEWS' Person of the Week. If it was not for The Washington Post and the ABCNEWS, the attention that DPN Protest would not have evolve into the national spotlight.

Plus, Ted Koppel's NIGHTLINE which hosted the debate between Elisabeth Zinser, Greg Hlibok (with female voice interpreter) and Marlee Matlin (with male voice interpreter) that ended up on a sour note. During the hour-long of NIGHTLINE, Hlibok was impressive to a point where Elizabeth Zinser decided to resign, according to The Week The World Heard Gallaudet by Jack Gannon.

Either way, Peter Jennings' persistent attention to the DPN during the week of March, 1988 inadvertently helped us to achieve the goals tremendously in breaking barriers for Deaf people and other minority groups.

Not only that, I recalled seeing Peter Jennings during the Gallaudet Commencement in 1991. He was quite nice, from what I was told by others.

You know, if not for Peter Jennings and ABCNEWS' WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, my parents probably will pick up the current events only on the newspapers. I mean, they probably will not know if Los Angeles was gone in the massive quake until the next morning!

How awful is that?! With the live captions, it makes our accessibility easier and possible.

Godspeed, Peter Jennings.

R-

UPDATE: It is tragic to demonstrate how stupid McWeenie is when he wrote on his blog about Peter Jennings, I do not want to link to that blogsite so I'm going to quote what he said:

Peter Jennings dies at age 67 in his home from lung cancer. He was an admitted smoker and smoked over 9/11.

Did 9/11 event ultimately put a path to his fateful destiny?

What?! Is this 'tard thing to say?! Peter was heavy smoker all of his adult life until 20 years ago in 1985 then he resumed again after 9/11. Lung Cancer probably was building up from the decades of heavy smoking, it was not 9/11 that did the deed, idiot! Common sense dictated that the lung cancer itself must have a long-term abuse for decades, not one day of current events that triggered his cancer!

I think it is important to remind how idiotic these wanna-be bloggers want to put stuff on the Internet!