CAN YOU SAY THAT ON THE AIR?

It takes an old guy. To shake up network "news," that is. It's not often that we at Dartboard hook up to the tube. (We prefer to be wired to the Internet.) But we couldn't have been more pleased to see the cutting edge of election coverage on ABC, just past 12:30 a.m. on election night this past Tuesday. David Brinkley, the veteran anchor, took the president to task for being the do-nothing milk-mustached little boy that he is. "We can all look forward with great pleasure to four years of wonderful, inspiring speeches, full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection--plus more goddamned nonsense," Brinkley wonderfully declaimed. Perhaps it is due to the fact that Brinkley is to retire after tomorrow's "This Week" that the heroic news man unleashed such ire at the Politco of Politicos, at a guy who might just as well have run the Undergraduate Council. It couldn't just have been Clinton who upset Brinkley. Surely that infamous Eli, George Herbet Walker Bush, could easily have earned the epithet of a "bore." It was the false objectivity, the boxed information, the unfortunate categorization of the television news that Brinkley detested. Of Clinton's victory speech, Brinkley opinionated that it was "one of the worst things I've ever heard."

Peter Jennings, the ABC anchor, found it necessary to interrupt Brinkley: "You can't say that on the air, Mr. Brinkley." To which Brinkley rightly responded, "Well, I'm not on the air." He's not, anymore, and he is finally liberated to inject some reality into TV-land, which otherwise throws up as a knee-jerk reaction those democratic platitudes we have all had to tolerate since news became corporate domain. Journalism as honesty? Journalism as the relation of reality? Journalism as acerbic sarcasm? Nyet. "You can't say that on the air, Mr. Brinkley."