David Brinkley and Chet Huntley debuted NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report in October 1956. A few months earlier, NBC producer Reuven Frank had put them together as a team to anchor the network’s television coverage of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominating conventions. Network news would never be the same. Nor would Sunday mornings a quarter of a century later, when Brinkley introduced on ABC, This Week with David Brinkley, which ran from 1981 until shortly before Brinkley’s retirement from television in 1997 (the program continues, but without Brinkley as moderator and without his name in the title). From the mid-1950s on, Brinkley not only reported the news, he also helped to shape the industry of television news. His renowned wit, his singular delivery, and his superb TV news writing style made him an institution in broadcast journalism.

However, Brinkley was no star when he first went to NBC Radio in 1943. His talent for strong and clear writing became evident as he continually struggled to write for announcers who read only the words and seemed to miss the meaning. He also began to gain experience as a newscaster when he did ten-minute newscasts for the network. He was not yet famous when he became the Washington, D.C., reporter for John Cameron Swayze’s Camel News Caravan, NBC’s early TV news effort. However, as the 1956 political conventions came into focus for the U.S. TV audience, viewers came to see, hear, and to know Brinkley as a new breed of TV journalist.

Brinkley was one of the first journalists to be absolutely comfortable with this new medium of TV. As his boss at NBC, Reuven Frank, often said, Brinkley had wit, style, intelligence, and perhaps most importantly, a lean writing style filled with powerful declarative sentences that is very effective in TV news. Brinkley was aware that TV was made up of pictures and corresponding sounds. He understood that the reporter has to stop talking and let the news footage tell the story. “Brinkley writes silence better than anyone else I know,” said Frank, and when this natural TV journalist was teamed with the California reporter Huntley, it proved to be a winning formula.

David Brinkley and Chet Huntley debuted NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report in October 1956. A few months earlier, NBC producer Reuven Frank had put them together as a team to anchor the network’s television coverage of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominating conventions. Network news would never be the same. Nor would Sunday mornings a quarter of a century later, when Brinkley introduced on ABC, This Week with David Brinkley, which ran from 1981 until shortly before Brinkley’s retirement from television in 1997 (the program continues, but without Brinkley as moderator and without his name in the title). From the mid-1950s on, Brinkley not only reported the news, he also helped to shape the industry of television news. His renowned wit, his singular delivery, and his superb TV news writing style made him an institution in broadcast journalism.

However, Brinkley was no star when he first went to NBC Radio in 1943. His talent for strong and clear writing became evident as he continually struggled to write for announcers who read only the words and seemed to miss the meaning. He also began to gain experience as a newscaster when he did ten-minute newscasts for the network. He was not yet famous when he became the Washington, D.C., reporter for John Cameron Swayze’s Camel News Caravan, NBC’s early TV news effort. However, as the 1956 political conventions came into focus for the U.S. TV audience, viewers came to see, hear, and to know Brinkley as a new breed of TV journalist.

Brinkley was one of the first journalists to be absolutely comfortable with this new medium of TV. As his boss at NBC, Reuven Frank, often said, Brinkley had wit, style, intelligence, and perhaps most importantly, a lean writing style filled with powerful declarative sentences that is very effective in TV news. Brinkley was aware that TV was made up of pictures and corresponding sounds. He understood that the reporter has to stop talking and let the news footage tell the story. “Brinkley writes silence better than anyone else I know,” said Frank, and when this natural TV journalist was teamed with the California reporter Huntley, it proved to be a winning formula.

TV news before Huntley and Brinkley was a combination of dull film reports, similar to movie newsreels of the 1940s, and a radio reporting style similar to that of the World War II era. Huntley and Brinkley took TV news into a new age of electronic journalism. According to one of their main competitors, Don Hewitt of CBS, who produced Walter Cronkite and, later, 60 Minutes, “They came at us like an express train.” When Huntley spoke, it was clear the story was a global story. When Brinkley spoke, it was clear it was a story about Washington. They began with a 15- minute newscast, and in 1963 the program increased to 30 minutes per night. Audiences now take for granted the sight of different journalists in different cities talking to each other on TV, but it was The Huntley-Brinkley Report that began such techniques. The switching back and forth between Huntley in New York and Brinkley in Washington created the now famous final exchange from every newscast: “Good night, David” . . . “Good night, Chet.” The order of the exchange alternated night by night—until their last newscast together in 1970, when Huntley’s “Good night, David” brought the response, “Good-bye, Chet.”

In that year, Huntley retired to a Montana ranch, and Brinkley became increasingly restless at NBC. His important role in The Huntley-Brinkley Report could not be matched, and he did not continue producing the excellent documentaries on David Brinkley’ s Journal. He became known as the grumpy older newsman in the NBC family. He did a series of programs for NBC, including NBC Nightly News and NBC Magazine with David Brinkley. However, he hated to go to New York to do the news, since he wanted Washington to be his news beat. Finally, in 1981, Roone Arledge hired Brinkley for ABC. All those years working on The Huntley-Brinkley Report had made Brinkley into the absolute Washington insider. When ABC gave him the Sunday program This Week with David Brinkley, he and his guests could talk among themselves and with all the other Washington insiders about the week’s news event.

Brinkley asked his friend George Will to join him on This Week with David Brinkley. ABC reporter Sam Donaldson joined as the resident “liberal” to confront Will’s avowed “conservative” stance. Besides the guests who were interviewed every week, other reporters such as National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts joined Brinkley, Will, and Donaldson. (Roberts was later to become a permanent fixture on ABC’s Sunday morning news program, sharing the moderating duties with Donaldson for a period after Brinkley’s retirement.) Some critics deemed the program to be very opinionated; it could be cynically referred to as ABC’s op-ed page. However, there had traditionally been very little interpretation of news on U.S. TV, and This Week with David Brinkley seemed to fill the void at least partially. Because of Brinkley’s strong Washington ties, the show at times appeared to consist of one group of Washingtonians talking to another. Criticisms aside, with ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley, Brinkley’s enormous talents and his many decades of TV news experience were given free reign.

Following his retirement, some criticism was leveled at Brinkley for appearing in commercials for Archer-Daniels-Midland, the giant agribusiness company. The primary point of the criticism was the fact that ADM was a key sponsor for This Week. But Brinkley’s presence was also seen by some as blurring the boundaries between journalistic responsibility and commercialization of news and information.

Brinkley received many awards, most notably the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush. Also among Brinkley’s awards were ten Emmys and four Peabodys, including one in 1992 for reporting on the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When asked what he thought his legacy to TV news would be, however, Brinkley told Broadcasting magazine, “Every news program on the air looks essentially as we started it [with The Huntley-Brinkley Report]. We more or less set the form for broadcasting news on television which is still used. No one has been able to think of a better way to do it.” David Brinkley passed away on June 11, 2003.