Good Night, Jim

Jim Lehrer, who died last week at 85, as perhaps the closest thing we've had to Walter Cronkite since Cronkite himself retired in 1981.  As the co-anchor of PBS's "The MacNeil-Lehrer Report" and the later "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour," now the PBS NewsHour, he offered clear, sober, dry television reporting reflecting his experience as a newspaper reporter that made PBS's newscast required viewing even as the three major network newscasts became parodies of themselves.  The PBS NewsHour's style of reporting remains essential in today's 24-hour cable news environment. You watch MSNBC or CNN for the latest news but you watch the PBS NewsHour to understand it.  (You watch the Fox News Channel for comedy.)

Jim Lehrer set the standard for PBS by covering the stories that matter most.  Throughout 1995, it was the only place to go for a newscast that didn't talk about the O.J. Simpson trial.   The NewsHour's stories are often seen as being dry and boring, but, as Lehrer himself said, when climate change or war affects you directly, none of that is boring.  Under Lehrer and his successors, the NewsHour spends more than a few moments on one story so you know the basics of the issue, not so that you're just informed. Information is not knowledge; knowing how to process information is, and the NewsHour is there to make sure you get it.  Lehrer's influence lives on.

Lehrer was not just a journalist, though; he was an accomplished novelist whose stories about the Kansas of his boyhood and latter-day Washington could be amusing and sometimes riveting, and he had a reporter's eye that enabled him to tell vivid stories.  Once a writer, always a writer.  His ability to communicate in journalism and in fiction with equal aplomb made him a national institution, and his death is a great loss . RIP. 

(The timing of his death was serendipitous; it occurred a week before the first day of issue of a U.S. postage stamp honoring his former colleague Gwen Ifill, which is this Thursday.)