David Brinkley's Real Legacy

Journalism legend David Brinkley is gone, but his legacy lives on.

That legacy was evident in pre-war polls that showed a majority of Americans thought Saddam was involved with al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks of 9-11, and that Iraq had or was on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons. Whenever the public internalizes as fact White House disinformation, rest assured that Brinkley-style journalism played a significant part.

I have scant memory of David Brinkley's long-ago work at NBC. Perhaps the reason he was hailed as a giant, both before and after his passing, is because he performed like one the first 40 years of his career. But judging from his 1981-1996 stint at ABC hosting a Sunday morning interview-and-chat show, "This Week with David Brinkley," he was mostly style and little substance. Sure, he used words economically and precisely, and he possessed a wry wit. But those qualities hardly offset his deference to power and his superficial, inside-the-beltway knowledge that made him an easy mark for U.S. officials eager to demonize a foreign foe or glorify a friend.

After Brinkley's death, Terri Gross, host of the fine NPR show "Fresh Air," replayed an interview she conducted several years ago with the broadcaster. Gross raised a point that I heard raised by no one else in the many tributes to Brinkley I saw, heard or read. She asked if he had any problem with the limited range of views expressed on his show, explaining that she didn't regard Sam Donaldson to be nearly as liberal as George Will was conservative.

Brinkley conceded that Donaldson was not Will's ideological opposite number, describing him as merely "somewhat liberal." Nevertheless, Brinkley told Gross he was pleased with the range of debate and saw no need to widen it.

Brinkley described himself to Gross as basically middle of the road -- liberal on some issues, conservative on others. But within a couple of years he would publish a book that revealed him to be a crotchety conservative and anti-tax zealot. Many of his admirers in the media were taken aback by his reactionary views, which didn't seem to fit the pleasant fellow with the courtly manners, wry wit and penchant for puncturing pompous asses not named George Will.

So the book created a dichotomy, with Brinkley seeing himself as a centrist and most informed observers now placing him somewhere on the right, though perhaps not in Will territory. It's no wonder that, from Brinkley's skewed perspective, he saw the generally centrist Donaldson as "somewhat liberal." But even if his assessment of Donaldson was on the money, that doesn't speak well of Brinkley: It shows he had no problem moderating every week a roundtable discussion that featured the very conservative Mr. Will while excluding a consistently liberal or progressive voice -- and misleading viewers about the panel by introducing it each week as (I'm paraphrasing Brinkley here) "our wide-ranging, no-holds-barred, free-for-all discussion."

Donaldson and Will often joined Brinkley in the interview portions of the show, and there, too, the limitations of this trio were apparent.

The first essay of media criticism for which I was paid looked at the January 15, 1984 edition of "This Week." Its focus was the crisis in Central America and the work of the "Kissinger Commission" -- a stacked-deck panel that had the appearance of balance but was dominated by conservative and centrist cold-war hawks. The Commission was convened by the Reagan administration to tell it exactly what it wanted to hear about its policies in that troubled region. (Yes, shocking as it may sound, there was a time in our democracy when a president or his top aides would tell prestigious panels and intelligence agencies to slant or invent facts and issue reports to justify the president's pre-determined policies.)