Glum and Twinkley

I went to college to become David Brinkley.

Television news evolved from the Movietone newsreel, beginning with John Cameron Swayze’s Camel Newsreel Theater in 1948.  All the world’s news in less than fifteen minutes, delivered by a histrionic announcer nearly out of breath with excitement and featuring, whenever possible, animals and women in bathing suits. It was “news” as spectacle, something distant and, ultimately, irrelevant—certainly not to be interpreted or understood.

But Swayze had a powerful rival, one of the “Murrow gang” at CBS (and, of course, there was Saint Edward R. himself taking down McCarthy):  Douglas Edwards.  The tone of CBS was serious and sober, intellectual and erudite.  “Newsreel” news started sounding as dated as Dixieland jazz in a bebop era.  And people were beginning to pay attention to television news.  An astounding number of people, in fact; within a decade, network television had become the primary news source of most Americans and newspapers had already begun their long decline.

How do you compete with a living legend and his band of apostles, people like Douglas Edwards, Eric Sevareid, Mike Wallace and an up-and-comer named Walter Cronkite?  NBC had a news broadcaster from the same mold named Chet Huntley, serious, credible and capable.  But where was the difference that would vault NBC’s newscast into the ratings lead?

Why not a team?  Comedy teams—Burns & Allen, Martin & Lewis, Laurel & Hardy—had been a mainstay of radio and translated well into early television, so why not try the formula with news?  Chet Huntley would be the perfect Murrow-esque straight man, and chubby-cheeked David Brinkley the wisecracking relief.

Brinkley injected irony into the news.  He was a solid journalist; his credentials were impeccable, so there was no question of his credibility.  But he also, through his tone and occasional sardonic comments (like saying that Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen appeared to comb his hair with an eggbeater) he relieved the impact of the events he reported. After an initial drop, the ratings started climbing, ultimately surpassing CBS’s.  A real comedy team rewrote the song Love and Marriage in their “honor”: 

Huntley Brinkley, Huntley Brinkley, one is glum and the other’s twinkly …

Throughout the crises of the early ‘60s, as I was coming of age—the Selma March and the Freedom Riders, the near-nuclear war of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination—they were my guides, especially Brinkley.  There was something about his sense of irony that was reassuring; the events were terrible, yes, and of great import—but we’d survive them.  Don’t take it all too seriously; that was Chet’s job.  When I majored in broadcast journalism at the University of Washington, it was because, primarily, of David Brinkley.

And that, I realize now, was the beginning of the most important change television brought about regarding news.  The messenger became as important as, if not more important than, the message.  Walter Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America” according to repeated polls, a televised personality with the authority of a revered spiritual leader.  Huntley retired in 1970 and faded from the scene rapidly, but Brinkley went on for decades more, always a star, always an authoritative entertainer (or perhaps an entertaining authority).  Through Watergate and the Reagan revolution and the Gulf War, he explained and reassured—and he provided the model of the personality journalist.

When cable news became a force in the 1990s, it wasn’t to the Murrow tradition that CNN and Fox and MSNBC turned; it was to the Brinkley manner.  He’d probably appreciate the irony that his legacy has become the Bill O’Reillys and Rachel Maddows and Anderson Coopers. 

Goodnight, David.