{"id":1842,"date":"2020-05-10T16:22:05","date_gmt":"2020-05-10T16:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=1842"},"modified":"2020-05-10T16:26:02","modified_gmt":"2020-05-10T16:26:02","slug":"ftv-david-brinkley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=1842","title":{"rendered":"FTV: David Brinkley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0David Brinkley\u2019s 1995 Memoir (Knopf Books) is on one hand a fascinating story of his life.\u00a0 Born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1920, he grew up in the same era as my father.\u00a0 Contrasting Brinkley\u2019s tales of growing up in the post-WWI south with my dad\u2019s stories of his early years in Wakefield, Michigan, I find many similarities.\u00a0 Certainly there were cultural differences between those two regions and their chosen careers (Brinkley in broadcasting and my father in public service as a State Trooper, Detective, and Investigator).\u00a0 With that said, they lived through the many cultural and sociological changes that took place in the United States in the Twentieth Century.\u00a0 Brinkley died in Houston, Texas on June 11, 2003 and the <\/span>New York Times <\/span><\/i>described him as. \u201cA veteran American newscaster who defined an entire era of television news reporting . . . whose pungent news commentaries delivered with a mixture of wry skepticism and succinct candor, set the standard for network television for generations.\u201d\u00a0 Brinkley\u2019s account of his career was also interesting because I learned a lot about the evolution of both radio and television broadcasting.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When there was but one TV Channel available in my younger days, WLUC-TV 6 in Marquette, was a CBS affiliate.\u00a0 My father was an avid Walter Cronkite man and even after cable added two more channels, he stuck with Uncle Walter for his evening news.\u00a0 I knew of David Brinkley in high school only in a roundabout way.\u00a0 My buddy Nick Gorski introduced me to the comedy songs of Tom Lehrer (which we spent many an afternoon snorting about).\u00a0 One song\u00a0 (about nuclear holocost*) entitled <\/span>So Long Mom (I\u2019m Off to Drop the Bomb<\/span><\/i>) had a lyric that went, \u201c<\/span>Watch Brinkally and Huntllay, describing contrapuntally, the cities we have lost.\u00a0 There\u2019s no need for you to miss a minute, of the agonizing holocost.\u201d <\/span><\/i>\u00a0Yes, dark humour to say the least but in dark times, this kind of humour helps keep one sane (author\u2019s note* – Lehrer often introduced the song by talking about all the great songs written for WWI and II:\u00a0 \u201cIf we indeed engage in a nuclear style WWIII, we better start writing the songs now\u201d).\u00a0 In this case, it made me aware of David Brinkley (and his news partner, Chet Huntley) even though I never watched NBC\u2019s newscasts.\u00a0 Times have changed.\u00a0 WLUC-TV is now an NBC affiliate and the old guard announcers are long retired and\/or expired.\u00a0 The reporting template those pioneers created, however,\u00a0 lives on even in our high tech, sound byte, 24 hour news cycle world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0David Brinkley\u2019s youth in Wilmington wasn\u2019t glamorous.\u00a0 Wilmington was a seaport city of about 35,000 people and in the infant days of radio, their small, unaffiliated station was strictly local.\u00a0 He describes his mother as a cold, disinterested parent who, after his father suffered a fatal heart attack when David was 8 years old, encouraged his early attempts to write by asking him, \u201cWhy are you wasting your time on this foolishness?\u201d\u00a0 His first brush with success came a few years later when the local 100 watt radio station sponsored an essay contest on the topic \u201cWhat WRBT Means to Wilmington.\u201d\u00a0 Brinkley\u2019s winning entry earned him the princely sum of five dollars, which he noted was four dollars more than he had ever possessed.\u00a0 He became a minor celebrity around his school.\u00a0 Brinkley was hired to work at the local A&P grocery store because the owner liked his essay about radio helping businesses in town.\u00a0 The contest win even warmed his mother to tell him, \u201c\u2018Oh, it\u2019s alright.\u2019\u00a0 For her, that was an emotional outburst.\u201d\u00a0 It was his high school English teacher who told him his writing was good and planted the seed that he might become a journalist.\u00a0 The thought had never crossed his mind, but it certainly took root.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The state of broadcasting for a 1930s era 100 watt radio station with no network affiliation is summed up pretty well by Brinkley\u2019s description of how they aired baseball games:\u00a0 \u201cWRBT hired a Western Union wire to bring in the World Series to the newspaper\u2019s office [that housed the station] by telegraph, using Morse Code to cover the action play-by-play.\u00a0 What came in were the barest bones, the briefest and most cryptic possible descriptions of each pitch and each play.\u00a0 Strike one came in over the wire as \u201cS1.\u201d\u00a0 When a batter hit a grounder to the shortstop and was thrown out at first, the Western Union operator sent this information:\u00a0 \u201c63O\u201d – meaning the ball was hit on the ground to the shortstop, position six, and then thrown to the first basemen, position three, and the batter was out.\u00a0 Had the runner managed to beat the throw to first, the wire would have read \u201c1B\u201d – a one-base hit.\u00a0 A generation of small-time radio announcers broadcast baseball games by starting with these tiny, dry bits of information and embellishing them with chatter about events in the game that sounded good on radio whether or not they actually happened, often describing a game far more exciting than the one being played.\u201d\u00a0 It took the rumblings in Europe leading up to World War II to convince the paper and WRBT that they needed to import news of the world through the Associated Press (AP) wire.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0On the advice of his English teacher, David had started working for the local paper in a program called Cooperative Education.\u00a0 As a cub reporter, he wrote copy for the <\/span>Star-News<\/span><\/i> and was sent to cover local stories the other reporters didn\u2019t want to cover.\u00a0 Brinkley would translate the wire service news into copy and when they began dabbling in radio, he was put on the air to read his five minutes of news. \u00a0 He remembered his first forays into live broadcasting:\u00a0 \u201cIn a one-station town with no network, people had never heard a news broadcaster who was any good and so [they] had no way of knowing how bad I was.\u00a0 It was the first of many times luck has been with me when talent was not.\u00a0 I am thankful that in these first years tape recording had not yet been invented.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Brinkley volunteered for the Army and ended up in a training unit with a group of Wilmington locals from the poorer side of town.\u00a0 As the supply sergeant, he made friends in the outfit by helping the GIs settle their debts with the Army.\u00a0 In the cash strapped peace time Army, lost equipment was charged to their pay and most of the GIs in his unit barely made ends meet as it was.\u00a0 Prior to his unit getting shipped overseas, he was diagnosed with a kidney ailment and sent home (an ailment that never bothered him before, during, or after the service).\u00a0 When his former unit landed at Normandy, they were the unfortunate recipients of a \u2018friendly fire\u2019 bombing that killed all but one member of the squad.\u00a0 Brinkley talks about \u2018luck\u2019 throughout his book with this certainly having been one of his luckiest moments.\u00a0 When he was cut loose from the Army, he went back to work at the paper and radio station in Wilmington until he was offered a position with the United Press (UP) in Atlanta.\u00a0 The small town boy in him was hesitant, but his boss convinced him that he would be foolish to not take a chance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As a young, draft deferred member of the UP, he was rotated to various stations when the young men in the bureaus were called to go to war.\u00a0 He credits his time in Nashville with improving his southern tinged diction.\u00a0 He became friendly with a graduate of Boston\u2019s Emerson College who happened to have been a speech and drama major.\u00a0 Her project was to get Brinkley to pronounce words like \u2018sedan\u2019 as \u2018se-DAN\u2019 and not \u2018SEE-dan\u2019 as he was wont to do in his southern dialect.\u00a0 From Nashville, he was routed east to Charlotte, NC where there was even less news to report than back in Nashville.\u00a0 Brinkley persuaded his boss to put in a word for him with CBS when a position opened in Washington, DC.\u00a0 With the arrangements made, he appeared in DC only to be shown the door when the office chief refused to see him, stating he had no knowledge of any open positions.\u00a0 Four blocks and ten minutes later, he was at the NBC office down the street.\u00a0 It was the fall of 1943 and whether he realized it or not, David Brinkley had finally found a permanent home.\u00a0 As NBC transitioned into that new fangled medium, television, Brinkley would be one of the pioneers;\u00a0 laying the blocks for the foundation of network news as we know it today.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Early on, they found it nearly impossible to broadcast TV news from a radio studio.\u00a0 The low ceilings and hot lights needed for the earliest TV cameras made for an uncomfortable atmosphere.\u00a0 Building a new studio would help, but how does one train people to broadcast in a new medium?\u00a0 The big names in radio avoided TV because they were used to simply reading copy from a printed sheet.\u00a0 TV news broadcasts required a different type of writing and visuals.\u00a0 Film needed to be shot and edited on the fly to fit narrow windows in the fifteen minute programs.\u00a0 Eventually, TV production became seamless enough to put the old movie house \u2018newsreels\u2019 out of business.\u00a0 Brinkley points out that the movie studios that had produced the newsreels archived all of their footage and are still making money from them today.\u00a0 Without widespread camera coverage during WWII, anyone needing stock footage of say, Winston Churchhill, needs to purchase it from the movie studio archives.\u00a0 In 1995, the going rate was a thousand dollars per minute.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The description Brinkley provides about the development of color television was also eye opening:\u00a0 \u201cDr. Peter Goldmark, the CBS scientist who invented the long-playing record, applied himself to this new challenge and in time came up with a color television system of sorts.\u00a0 It consisted mainly of a motor-driven rotating wheel with a series of mirrors and pieces of colored glass.\u00a0 It did, indeed, produce a pretty color picture.\u00a0 But its disadvantages were overwhelming.\u00a0 It was totally incompatible with existing black-and-white TV sets, meaning the CBS system instantly would make very existing set obsolete.\u00a0 Since the color picture would have to be viewed through one half of the rotating wheel, the wheel would always have to be more than twice the size of the pciture.\u00a0 To build the twenty-on-inch TV set in common use today [1995] would require a rotating wheel about five feet in diameter.\u00a0 Where would you put that in your living room?\u00a0 Not only that, since the CBS apparatus required an electric motor driving a rotating wheel, there certainly would be some noise.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0RCA had rushed out a demonstration of their own color TV system a few weeks earlier and it was a complete disaster.\u00a0 Their half finished system produced a dim, fuzzy image with purple bananas and women with green lipstick.\u00a0 The <\/span>Variety<\/span><\/i> headline said it all:\u00a0 \u201cRCA lays a colored egg.\u201d\u00a0 The FCC was poised to make the cumbersome CBS system the industry standard until the major TV manufacturers (RCA, Zenith, and Philco among them) refused to make TV sets to run the CBS system.\u00a0 It set the whole idea of color TV back for some time, allowing RCA\u2019s David Sarnoff to come up with the system that was finally approved as the industry standard by the FCC.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Television coverage of both the Democratic and Repbulican presidential conventions in 1948\u00a0 was primitive and not widely seen by the American public.\u00a0 Radio newsmen were used to filling their reports by explaining activities their listeners could not see.\u00a0 Having them describe action that was being broadcast on TV became redundant:\u00a0 \u201cThe senator finished his speech, folded it up, put it in his jacket pocket and returned to his seat.\u201d\u00a0 By the 1952 conventions, 17 million American homes had televisions, but the broadcast networks were still trying to use commentators who had cut their teeth in radio.\u00a0 Lack of cable connections to the west coast (the three major networks had to share one coaxial cable feed for pooled film footage) meant each network had to add their own narration via the more numerous radio lines.\u00a0 As the directors became more adept at filming the dull convention action from more interesting angles, the news people had to find ways to add their narration to the clips without simply repeating what the viewers were seeing.\u00a0 Brinkley first worked the conventions for TV in 1952.\u00a0 The problems he observed in the radio-to-TV transition period would finally coalless into the new reporting template in time for NBC\u2019s 1956 convention coverage.\u00a0 Most of these rudimental elements are still employed today.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Two things transpired in the broadcast world before the 1956 conventions.\u00a0 The first was a nation-wide search undertaken by NBC to find the \u2018next Edward R. Morrow\u201d type of newsman, only one who could translate their work to television.\u00a0 Chet Huntley was discovered in Los Angeles and hired to work out of New York.\u00a0 Brinkley and NBC production guru Reuven Frank discussed the \u2018how to\u2019 of convention coveraged and decided the fewer rules the better.\u00a0 The one obvious (yet previously not employed) tenent became known as the Frank-Brinkley rule:\u00a0 \u201cIn talking over a television picture, never tell the viewers what they can easily see for themselves.\u00a0 If you cannot add anything useful to what is in the picture, keep quiet.\u201d\u00a0 NBC had been rated second behind CBS\u2019s 1952 coverage and there was no doubting NBC\u2019s desire to up their game for the next convention cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The second key to improving NBC\u2019s 1956 convention was the pairing of Huntley and Brinkley.\u00a0 No one was sure the pairing would even work because some of the network suits had little confidence in Brinkley.\u00a0 He was, after all, not a New Yorker (but then again, neither was Huntley).\u00a0 The match garnered positive reviews so NBC opted to keep them together.\u00a0 The two went on to host the NBC nightly news for nearly two decades.\u00a0 The New York based Huntley and Washington, DC based Brinkley, broadcasting in tandem, were not an immediate hit.\u00a0 They eventually gained a wider audience, and a name:\u00a0 The Huntley – Brinkley Report.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Brinkley said that when they finally were given their iconic, \u201cGood night, David, Good night, Chet\u201d sign off, he hated it.\u00a0 To him it sounded trite but apparently their viewers liked it.\u00a0 It became iconic enough that people on the street would greet Brinkley with a jolly, \u201cGood night, David\u201d long after he left NBC news.\u00a0 In Part 2 of <\/span>David Brinkley<\/span><\/i>, we will examine some 1950s history beyond the birth of network TV news.<\/span><\/p>\n

Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Tom Lehrer’s ‘So Long Mom’ mentioned above!\u00a0 A song for WWIII not yet needed, Thank God!