David Brinkley's view of television

This is from David Brinkley's gravesite in Wilmington, North Carolina. I wish I'd seen this earlier, when I was writing The Electronic Mirror. (I ran across it last week while looking up a factoid that you'll see in this Saturday's piece.) It wouldn't have added anything new to the book, but it would have been a validation, a confirmation of my view that television acts as a time capsule that told you what it was like back then.

As it is, it's kind of cool to see how close the subtitle of The Electronic Mirror—"What Classic TV Tells Us About Who We Were and Who We Are (and Everything In-Between)"—comes to Brinkley's own view of early television. I consider that pretty good company. TV