On Monday’s NewsNight, CNN’s Aaron Brown offered the best essay I’ve heard about Peter Jennings. Here is the transcript. A highlight:

For a thousand reasons, his death came too soon. He should have been given the victory lap, the dinners, the articles, the awards, the accolades that mark a job well-done, a life well-lived. He deserved that. And though he would have said otherwise, I think he would have liked it. And we should have had more time to watch him work, to tell the stories that have yet to unfold. But he would also say that he lived a charmed life. That he’d been to places, and told the stories, and had the experiences that a young boy imagined and dreamed about, and he did. And we should be grateful, all of us who watched him and those of us who were privileged to work with him, that we were part of the ride.

> Brown adds: “I never once saw him look at a story, treat a story with anything other than complete fairness and demand the same from us. The silly little web sites on the left and the right will spend days saying otherwise, but they are wrong.”