David Brinkley 1920 - 2003

June 12, 2003 11:47 AM

David Brinkley dead at 82. He was one third of the 'holy trinity' of network news in my youth, along with Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. His career covered the White House from FDR to Bill Clinton. This Week With David Brinkley was one of my favorite things to watch on a Sunday. He'll be missed, and I reminisce on how much journalism, and not just on television, has changed since I was a child.
posted by WolfDaddy (8 comments total)

Peace.
I always thought he had a sense of class and dignity you don't see much anymore.
posted by Lungsbreth at 12:52 PM on June 12, 2003

Good night, David...
posted by briank at 12:53 PM on June 12, 2003

'Holy Trinity', indeed. I'm not (yet) ancient by standards of age, but those three names evoke something that few of today's anchors do. It's not nostalgia as much as the sense that they did great work expanding journalism for the burgeoning medium of television, and served to build a foundation upon which viewers could place a level of trust.

There's much to be said for online publishing--for better and for worse--expanding the directions of modern journalism. But anchors such as Brinkley are where the rubber met the road, so to speak, for many viewers. The experienced, confident ride his peers led many of us on will definitely be missed.
posted by LinusMines at 1:33 PM on June 12, 2003

but those three names evoke something that few of today's anchors do

I find I lost 'name recognition' when it came to journalists and their networks around the time of Gulf War I, for whatever that's worth. I know, for example, that many of the CNN journalists in Baghdad at the time are still around, but I'd be hard-pressed to identify them with any one (or more!) network.

Just another symptom of our short-attention span, 500-channel-surfing society, or reflection of the fact that none of us seem to hold 'lifetime' jobs with one employer any more?
posted by WolfDaddy at 2:36 PM on June 12, 2003

Nice prepackaged obit, doesn't even mention cause of death. Yep, journalism is changing.
posted by DBAPaul at 3:17 PM on June 12, 2003

DBAPaul: It's not an obituary. It's a biography, viz. the present perfect tense. Here's the ABC obit (he died of complications from a fall).
posted by dhartung at 4:51 PM on June 12, 2003

Read his autobiography sometime. Interesting and full of that wonderful dry wit of his.
posted by pmurray63 at 9:12 PM on June 12, 2003

All day long I was humming Tom Lehrer's "So Long Mom, I'm Off To Drop The Bomb," for this line:

"While we're attacking frontally,
watch Brinkley and Huntley
Describing contrapuntally the cities we have lost.
No need for you to miss a minute
of the agonizing holocaust."
posted by GaelFC at 9:45 AM on June 13, 2003