Peter Jennings, despite being relatively unknown in China, is acclaimed as one of America's most respected newsmen. The ABC News anchorman lost his battle with lung cancer at the pinnacle of his journalism career in 2005 aged only 67, but left behind a great legacy as a smart, inquisitive and human storyteller.

Zou Yue, head of the Anchors Team of China Global Television Network, is in the perfect position to share his thoughts on A Reporter’s Life, a collection of interviews and work which records the heavyweight anchor’s starry decades in the business.

Peter Jennings, along with the other two of the "Big Three" trio of network anchors, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and CBS’s Dan Rather, ushered in an era of broadcast news in America, with their reach even extending to the rest of the world. “When I grew up, I looked up to these guys,” Zou Yue said, adding that “I wanted to do the same things that they’ve been doing.”

And Zou is all the more willing to relate himself to Jennings, probably because they’re alike in some ways: both rose to fame in their 20s, and the two also share a craving for knowledge.

At the age of 27, Jennings, the handsome reporter with a movie star aura, was promoted to the anchor desk, a post he later admitted that he was not qualified for. He decided to quit as an anchor and start again from scratch, building his journalistic credibility by covering conflicts in the Middle East and other hot spots as ABC’s foreign correspondent, before returning to the studio again a decade later.

Zou revealed that he went through a similar experience. “I became an anchor very young…21 or 22,” Zou said, “I also felt that gap of knowledge, of experience of vision about the world. So I decided to do more reporting.” In the early days of his career, Zou spent more time doing stories in the field rather than anchoring in the studio, undergoing several years of on-the-job training that Zou described as being “worth it.”

Jennings, a Canadian-born high school dropout, may not have expected that he would one day become the face of a prestigious American television network. For decades, tens of millions of Americans looked to him for the latest big news events.

For Zou, there was a good reason for that. “Peter Jennings is a guy who always wants to relate to people,” Zou said, and Jennings knew well how to charm people, be it an average person on the street or a head of state.

Jennings was a trustworthy journalist who told the story as it should be, and he was also capable of seeing things differently—a quality Zou reserved the most compliments for, citing his insistence on devoting more airtime to the Bosnian genocide, when the whole country’s news coverage was more focused on O.J. Simpson's murder trial. The decision won him much praise later.

“I hope I can have that vision, and maybe do something historic in some way,” Zou  said. “Maybe not as much as Peter Jennings did, but it is the ambition of every journalist.”

The preview for the book on Amazon said “throughout his life, Peter Jennings was driven by a passion to seek the truth and convey that truth accurately, simply, cleanly, and elegantly to his American audience,” a passion echoed by Zou.

Zou believes all journalists, including himself and his counterparts in the country, have the common mission of seeking truth, despite growing skepticism over the standards of Chinese journalism and press freedom.

“Truth is the denominator of everything we share in this world,” Zou said. People from different historical, political, cultural contexts may have different views on understanding a truth, but one single aspiration shared by Jennings and all the other reporters around the globe should be “trying to get to the bottom of the world.”

Jennings’ life story, according to Zou, is philosophical food for all people’s thoughts. The book’s compelling first-person anecdotes reveal the values and principles that Jennings lived by throughout his life – his intellectual curiosity and critical thinking, among others, will help people better “appreciate the building and complexity of the world”, Zou said.