A few words on the late Tim Russert.
I’m not going to lie and say I never had a negative word to say about Tim Russert’s work, because while I enjoyed “Meet the Press” more than most TV news programs, I always felt Russert treated some of his more prominent guests with more reverence than they deserved. I would often turn off the TV at 11:30 on Sunday morning feeling a little piqued, the journalist in me wishing Russert had taken advantage of a hole left open by a dodgy, prevaricating politico and asked the really tough follow-up that would have delivered a knockout blow to the bullshit being laid on the collective doorstep of the American people. In that way, Russert had become the tribal elder in a Washington press corp that now seems content appeasing and working alongside, instead of in direct opposition to, the wheelers and dealers that are steering this country headfirst down a path littered with the remains of fallen empires.
Yet every week I tuned in to watch Russert do his thing. He seemed to be a fan of politics the way the best sportscasters come off as diehard fans of the games they cover. And like the best in the sportscasting business, Russert was able to entertain and inform without manipulating the emotional swells of his audience, the difference between a class act like Vin Scully and a hack like John Sterling. Russert was affable yet dignified, composed but never without an air of intellectual mischief common to all news geeks. He often embodied the best of the worst in his field, balancing a Chris Matthews-like bombast and chicanery with a solemnity that shows up only occasionally these days, when relics like Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather sit in for something big.
I first became aware of Russert’s approach to political coverage when, as an innocent and still-malleable seventeen-year-old, I watched unprecedented madness unfold on Election Night 2000. Sure, the absurdity of Bush-Gore went a long way in peeking my interest in politics, as did the discovery of Hunter Thompson’s more serious work, but it was Russert madly scribbling on his dry-erase board, breaking down all the electoral possibilities, that first made me realize politics could be fun in the way baseball and football are fun. My relationship with politics, and the news in general, escalated from a flirtation to an obsession quickly thereafter. I’m not sure I’d be as interested or informed as I am now had it not been for the excitement Russert brought to an event that was otherwise depressing and bleak.
In the last year or so, however, I had grown annoyed with Russert, the final straw coming when he proclaimed, in the wake of the Scooter Libby trial in which he was called as a witness, that he considered all talks with sources off-the-record unless the source stated otherwise. This runs counter to every notion I and many others hold dear about a journalist’s relationship with his sources. Journalists are not in the business of protecting their sources from unintentionally loose lips, and when Russert made his approach public I felt betrayed. I had a hard time taking him seriously from that point on. No matter what he said or did in any interview or commentary, it always lingered in the back of my mind that he cared more about coddling his sources to ensure access than he did about disseminating the truth.
As is too often the case, though, it took a man’s death to bring to light the enormity of his influence. I ask myself now, Where would I be had I not seen Russert’s monstrous cranium bobbing about as he jotted illegible figures on that white board, eyes wide and crazy-looking, in the days before wars on terror and $4 gasloline? If not Russert, who else could have gotten me interested in this dirty game with which I am now obsessed?
And that is why I was so saddened to hear of his sudden passing Friday afternoon. Right now, there is some seventeen-year-old kid only marginally interested in politics who would love to pay attention if only it didn’t seem so boring. That kid needs a journalist like Tim Russert to make him tune in or pick up a paper, to get him involved in the process that will shape the social context in which he will grow, to make something as infuriatingly crooked and irremediable as national politics seem like a good way to spend a Sunday morning.
Tags: Tim Russert