Word: brinkley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lecture delivered at Columbia University more than a decade ago, David Brinkley proposed doing away entirely with "the role of the all-wise, all-informed, all-knowing journalistic supermen." Brinkley objected to the way "the whole apparatus of press agentry and promotion is put to work ... promoting stars along with promoting news, to the point where it is not clear which is which." The only solution, Brinkley argued, was to "report the news the way newspapers report it," with many reporters spending the day developing stories, "then having them, all of them, report on the ah" whatever they have learned...
That proposal of his now seems too radical to Brinkley, but Arledge, no stranger to the artifices of show business, is thinking along the same lines. Anchorman Brinkley, who has collected $2 million dollars or more from NBC since making that speech, no longer talks about the vanishing anchorman. Wry as ever about his job, Brinkley now concedes that a familiar face is needed as a "switching agent," but he deplores those elaborate anchorman desks that to him look like airline ticket counters. Not to worry. Now that Brinkley is returning to Washington, from a New York he has never...
Chancellor and Brinkley might well agree with Arledge that being an anchorman "who may or may not have written his own stuff, reading from a TelePrompTer what others have gathered," is no big deal. How accomplished does one have to be to read switch cues like "President Carter today signed a bill creating the Department of Energy. Bob Schieffer has that story"? Yet the nation's celebrated top anchormen have held office, and popularity, for longer terms than Presidents. The fact is, their best qualities are only on stand-by reserve when they read the evening news...
...school and not have to worry about anything except how well the stocks Dad gave you for Christmas are doing. Close enough to meet the people he knew he was going to have to know later on, when Harvard would give way to the real world of Cronkite and Brinkley and when the rich kid would go back...
...politics, values and mores. But the reader is never quite sure when Mayer crosses the line between humor and conviction. The angels in Heaven bustle about designing portable restrooms, and manna and nectar refreshment concessions for the up-coming gala bimillenium. ("We're expecting millions of tourists," Mary tells Brinkley.) The bumbling corruption of Soviet-American disarmament negotiators and the CIA's school for assassins are cleverly ridiculed, but the caricatures contain more than a morsel of truth. Yet the whole "message," if it is indeed a message, is almost too absurd...