(Continued from Page 1) truth is I would have

(Continued from Page 1)

truth is I would have been very happy to stay in Wilmington, North Carolina working on the newspaper, because I really loved it. In some ways it was the best job I ever had.

One reason for this is - and living in (Rappahannock) you can understand this: a town of that size (Wilmington - pop. 50,000) is coherent. You can grasp and understand a community of that size, mainly because you know everything about it, you know almost everybody in town, at least everybody above the rank of PFC.

Whereas a huge sprawling city like this one (Washington, D.C.) or like New York is really too much to grasp, too much to understand, and really too much to deal with. All you ever do is deal with one detail of one part of town, or one aspect of the city.

I never really have thought of Walt Disney as a great social or political philosopher, but there’s one thing he used to say that I think is true: and it is that “no city should be bigger than 100,000 (people), and no city should be so big that the only time people ever see their mayor is on television.”

That’s because it (the city) loses something, it loses a sense of community.

Rappahannock News: How has notoriety affected you? Brinkley: Not at all. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t take it seriously. Rappahannock News: Is the Press firmly entrenched as the Fourth Estate, or is its role still seriously questioned by itself, government and the public? Brinkley: I think the answer is yes to both questions. I think it is seriously entrenched, and its role is questioned by government and questioned by the public. I think one reason the Press is under such scrutiny is that it’s a field in which everyone feels he is entitled to be an expert. It is the object (of criticism) by academic, word-processor, word-oriented assistant professors who teach journalism or who don’t teach journalism.

To produce a so-called scholarly paper on the faults of the Press is so re