He never graduated high school????. Really?????.
Jennings dropped out of high school in the 10th grade.
World News Tonight, February 20, 1990, five days before the Sandinistas were voted out of power.
This quote is quite accurate, but it leaves out a preceding sentence from Jennings:
"“We begin tonight with a new ABC News poll in Nicaragua that suggests that President Daniel Ortega and his government will be re-elected comfortably in this Sunday’s elections.”
I know, because I happen to be the former ABC News Central America correspondent (1982-1991).
Imagine Peter’s shock when on Sunday the Nicaraguan people decisively rejected the Sandinistas by a margin of 59 to 41, in a vote that even Jimmy Carter (who was present) had to admit reflected reality.
(In fact, the Sandinistas tried but failed to rig the vote successfully. Even so, their efforts grossly distorted the real voter sentiment. In an unrigged election, the margin would have been 80 to 20 against the Sandinistas.)
Peter Jennings personally blocked my assignment to cover this election, even though I had been reporting from Nicaragua since 1981. Another reporter named John Martin was sent instead. I was ordered out of Nicaragua and parked in nearby El Salvador.
On Monday morning, when the results were in, Jennings’s handpicked Executive Producer of World News Tonight, Paul Friedman woke me up in my hotel room in San Salvador. He ordered me to get over to Managua on the next flight. It fell to me to explain on ABC World News that night why ABC’s own poll was wrong and why the Sandinistas lost.
(I did not report it that night because I did not know it, but the ABC News polling unit had subcontracted its Nicaragua poll to a Sandinista-controlled polling firm. Can you imagine?)
I later called up the head of the ABC polling unit and bitterly complained that we had been made to look like fools. He agreed and apologized.
Peter Collins, former ABC News Correspondent, 1982-1991, aka "Pajama Guy" and a lurker/poster on Free Republic since 1998.