Television: Brinkley’s Journal

The trouble with most news types who set up their own feature shows on television is that their personalities get in the way of their material. A notable exception is NBC’s David Brinkley, whose weekly Journal is one of the few bright, if rough-cut, developments in the shabby new TV season. With an eye for a good story and a far-ranging curiosity that has roamed from the Far East to the U.S. Far West, Brinkley has made his reports with a quiet and respectful straightforwardness. He has neither the hollow clangor of those doomsaying voices of oldtime radio nor the portentous solemnity of Edward R. Murrow. whose excellent programs were frequently made irritating by the narrator’s apparent attempt to be a grand intermediator between the unwashed audience and the unvarnished truth. Brinkley has also resisted the temptation to live up to his own reputation for being “dry and witty,” which might have led him into a disastrous attempt to become a kind of newsy Fred Allen.

A-O.K., Man. Brinkley’s Journal got off to an unpromising start in its first program, presenting a splendid rendition of America the Beautiful on the audio while the video showed pictures of trash heaps, automobile graveyards, dump trucks dumping, and beer cans floating in the shining sea. Only a freshman in a high school journalism class would have considered it a towering achievement. But after that he settled down to some remarkable short studies, in which the camera work was vivid and the scripts (which he writes himself) tartly acute.

A gaudy tour of Cocoa Beach, the community nearest Cape Canaveral, enraged the citizens of Cocoa Beach but showed the rest of the country the phenomena that spring up around the space age’s launching pads: beatniks swinging as if hooked on liquid oxygen, splashy motels by the mile, a real estate agent selling outback lots for $1,595 an acre, a wiggly blonde singing in a nightspot about her A-O.K. flight in a rocket with her spaceman. Then he switched to Britain’s cheap-jack sex-and-crime newspapers and an abrasively candid interview with Cecil Harmsworth (“I’m a highbrow”) King, publisher of London’s Daily Mirror.

Hoods & Cowboys. In the subsequent weeks the program has improved steadily. One installment argued with heavy irony that crime does pay. The biggest hoods in the U.S. “are not in jail.” said Brinkley, “they’re here.” And with that he showed some of the kingpins’ lavish mansions in Grosse Pointe. Mich., rattling off the residents’ names and specialities, from narcotics to counterfeiting. At one estate the hoods and their families came out and started pushing the NBC cameramen around; Brinkley showed that, too. A more obvious entry in the Journal dealt with that old American folk hero, the cowboy, as he lives in 1961. Brinkley found his latter-day cowboys at a 200,000-acre ranch in Wyoming, where the working day begins at 3 a.m. with breakfast, and other meals are served at 9:30 a.m. and 6 p.m.. and the menu never varies: beef, beans, potatoes. The surprising truth seems to be that the American cowboy has changed very little essentially: he is still a lone rider, taking orders resentfully, literally quitting at the drop of a hat.

Brinkley has also done fine studies of British Guiana and its recent election, and Cambodia having a jolly good time accepting bridges, harbors and schools from a dozen nations East and West. This week he talks about credit buying in the U.S. and TV commercials abroad. Often pointing up issues but never preaching, the program is at best as sharp as an ax, but it seldom grinds one. “Brinkley’s not out to save the world.” says Producer Ted Yates. “He’s just out to be Brinkley.”