Say it ain't so, David

You can add my voice to the journalistic choir singing, "You Shouldn't Have Done It" outside David Brinkley's house. We hope the shivaree will wake him up.

Brinkley seems to have been delivering the news on television since before TV was even invented. For that matter, I think he's been doing it since before news itself was invented. If there's a Mount Rushmore of TV newspeople, he should be carved there alongside Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

First for NBC with Chet Huntley and later at ABC on his own, Brinkley spent five decades building a towering and deserved reputation as a commentator who looked at the passing parade with one eye slightly closed in either doubt or skepticism.

For sale

Then he went and sold himself to the highest bidder, garnering something else that's equally deserved: lots of "shame-on-you's" from other reporters.

After recently retiring from ABC, Brinkley soon reappeared as a commercial pitchman for Archer Daniels Midland, the huge agribusiness that sponsored his Sunday-morning program, "This Week With David Brinkley." With his trademark hesitating vocal style, he informed the audience that he was going to deliver another kind of news -- the news of his bosses at ADM.

There are several things wrong with this, both for him personally and for journalism in general:

* To resurface in such a role, especially so soon after retiring, marks his previously untarnished memory with an unsightly smudge;

* To come back as the hawker of ADM seems like pay-back for years of sponsorship;

* To have those commercials air on his old show trades on the reputation he built up on that very show as someone who brooked no nonsense from anyone in government or business. In fact, soon after they first appeared, ABC announced that it was removing the ads from that show.

Why, David?

It's not like Brinkley has labored for half a century as an ink-stained wretch for Mr. Scrooge and now needs money to buy denture adhesive. He has earned in the six- and seven-figure range for years. A quiet and honorable retirement would have done him just fine. If he needed to be active, like many other senior citizens, he could have found a dozen other ways of doing it, ways that wouldn't leave a sour taste in so many mouths.

Defending Brinkley's sell-out are his successors at "This Week" -- Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson -- although their defense is hardly ringing. But they have smudges of their own; they are among the TV journalists who rake in tens of thousands of dollars annually by speaking before trade organizations.

Sam, Cokie and David will tell you that none of this matters, and that they are perfectly capable of maintaining their objectivity. If ADM starts hiring 12-year-olds to till its fields, they say, they will be right there with their cameras to let us know about it.

But even if that's so, even if they are capable of separating their roles as pitchmen and journalists, the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, an appearance which journalists should avoid like Road Runner avoids Wile E. Coyote. It's a simple matter of ethics.

David, you made it to the finish line in style and broke the tape with honor. Why go and spoil it all on the cool-down lap?

(02-05-98)

[[In-content Ad]]