I have been intently following the death of Peter Jennings these last two days. Yesterday, I TiVo’d/watched ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “World News Tonight,” and “Nightline,” all of which were almost entirely devoted to Jennings and his death. It was surreal to see Charles Gibson last night hosting what is officially called “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings,” reporting about Peter Jennings. At one point I half-expected Jennings himself to appear and report on his own death, because it just seemed like the type of job he should be doing.

GMA and “Nightline” had split-screen interviews with Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather yesterday. It was so odd to see them interviewed on ABC, since each man is so strongly identified with his own network.

Why my interest in all this? I don’t know. But I’ve always been interested in national network TV news. My parents had the “Today” show on every morning when I was a kid, and I used to love it when Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley would spend a week on location somewhere – Rome, Moscow, Africa. When I was 14, my dad, my brother and I took the NBC studio tour at Rockefeller Center, and we got to see the “Today” set. After we got home, I took a shoebox and some old Fisher-Price Little People furniture and recreated the set from memory. I decided that my dream job, when I grew up, would be to anchor the “Today” show or the network evening news and travel all over the world and interview world leaders. I still think it would be fun to anchor a broadcast of a breaking news event. I haven’t enjoyed the network news programs as much since they switched their focus to celebrity news, but I’ve still got that fondness for them.

It’s weird that in less than nine months, all three nightly news anchors with whom my generation grew up – Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather – have left their posts. There a few good pieces about this today from the Chiacgo Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Post (Howard Kurtz), and the New Jersey Star-Ledger. I particularly like this quote from the latter: “[Jennings] was Mr. Spock to Brokaw’s folksy Bones McCoy and Rather’s impetuous Captain Kirk — an alien intelligence from the planet Canada, offering not a hug or even a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but a poker face that was accented, on rare occasions, by a faintly raised eyebrow.”

I think the quote exaggerates Jennings’s aloofness, but the comparison of the three is apt. (Can’t you totally see Dan Rather as Captain Kirk?)

As Spock might put it, the death of Peter Jennings is, simply, illogical.