Anchor’s Away

(Props to Monty)

Or

Signing off for the last time, he's Peter Jennings

(Kudos to Craig)

Or

He's News Tonight

(Honorifics to Mark)

Or

Anchored Man

(Tip o’ the cap to Mark)

Burying the Lead

(Mark completes the trifecta)

Peter Jennings, an inspiration for all Canadian high-school dropouts, threw a monkeywrench into the 2006 GHI, succumbing to lung cancer at the age of 67. Recognizing that no one would ever be able to read news behind a desk with such élan, ABC, NBC and CBS announced that, following the customary 3 days of round-the-clock coverage of his death and impact on the world, their news divisions would be shuttered immediately and they would begin airing infomercials in place of the evening news. Jennings first took the chair in 1964 at the age of 26 in a failed experiment. He was let loose on the world shortly thereafter as a foreign correspondent and helped ABC to emphasize its foreign coverage. From London, he would co-anchor the evening news with Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson in another failed experiment, before retaking the anchor spot in 1984. For a decade, Jennings kept ABC atop the news ratings, until the mid-1990s when most Americans could no longer find the rest of the world on a map if you spotted them a hemisphere. Expected to return to glory after Tom Brokaw passed the torch to hairdo Brian Williams and Dan Rather was put out to pasture like a cross-eyed steer with the mange in March 2005, Jennings made the surprising announcement in April that he had advanced lung cancer, and never appeared on camera again. He did visit the newsroom once, telling his fill-in anchor Charles Gibson how much it meant that he continued to sign off each broadcast, “For Peter Jennings and all of us here at ABC News, Good night.” Ever the newsman, he then set about critiquing the plan for that evening’s broadcast.