Life and Deatherage
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» Friday, June 13, 2008Tim Russert: 1950-2008
It is possible to both respect a man and strongly criticize his work. That's how I felt about Tim Russert, who collapsed at his desk early this afternoon and died.
Earlier this week, I told my friend Faye that rolled my eyes at Russert's insistence that he be introduced as "NBC News Washington bureau chief and moderator of Meet The Press," because the word "moderator" gave his work a distinction I felt it did not deserve. In its original context, Meet the Press was exactly that: a television forum where news makers faced a panel of experienced reporters and answered their questions on live TV. Good reporters will pursue a topic that a subject wants to dodge, but that could go on for a full hour at times, and a moderator has to make sure that everyone gets a turn to speak and respond, and that the discussion doesn't get stuck on one topic when there should be more to cover.
Russert's Meet the Press hasn't been like that—he asks the questions, alone, and the candidate responds. And too often, Russert was willing to let them provide incomplete or false answers and then move on. He tended to latch onto narratives and then resist being shaken from them, like that Republicans are strong on national security, Guiliani was the strongest GOP candidate, and that John McCain is a "maverick" whose motives are beyond question.
Media Matters for America has documented plenty of instances of Russert asking tough "gotcha" questions of Democrats, but not pursuing the same tenacity towards Republicans, and of ignoring subjects the GOP would prefer not be brought up. And in today's hagiographies, you'll probably not hear much about his failure of journalism as exposed in the CIA leak scandal: it was revealed that Dick Cheney's office often chose to put their people on Meet the Press because it was their "best format" to "control [the] message." That was partially true because, as Russert testified (in Dan Froomkin's paraphrase), "when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record."
(To NBC News's credit, they did not shy away from this as much as you might expect. Their slideshow of Russert's career includes a courtroom sketch of him testifying in the Scooter Libby trial, image #6.)
Russert's insistence on being the "moderator" of Meet the Press deflected his own blame in these failings, because it invokes the image of a lofty guardian of a news tradition instead of admitting the truth: Russert was "the press" on Meet the Press more often than not, and Meet Tim Russert doesn't have the same ring to it.
Maybe that was because he was trained as a lawyer and was actually a member of the bar in both New York and Washington, D.C., and didn't want to have background conversations that would produce stuff that, as a reporter, he would feel obliged to use on the air immediately. As foreign as that seems, I understand it.
I try to commit journalism in my profession from time to time, but I also have off-the-record discussions with people in the know to help me understand the bigger picture. We write code for internal use and are members of Apple's developer programs, which involves non-disclosure agreements for unreleased products. In pure journalism, I would never agree to that because a pure reporter never agrees to acquire information he can't use in a report. I still question whether it's a good idea or not, but I know that without NDAs (and new product embargos, in which reporters agree not to mention news until a specific date and time), I'd be far far behind on new technologies when they were released. I try to justify it with "that's just how it's done," but it's difficult when unreleased information (like from a WWDC) gives you an understanding that you can't share. Do you get the bigger picture together so you're ready to talk when you can, or do you stay in the dark and try to pry it out of people who've agreed not to talk and risk not knowing anything before the new technology hits the streets? For Russert, I imagine that it was more like, "Do I talk to these people and understand their plans and philosophies, or do I remain purely reactive when I'm supposed to be explaining these things to millions of people?"
The risk, of course, is getting spun: the belated realization that what you learned privately was not the truth that couldn't be told yet, but spin (or lies) designed to make you believe an agenda was more pure than it was, and Russert seems to have fallen for that more than once.
Nonetheless, I have no doubts that, unlike an O'Reilly or a Limbaugh or a Hannity (or even Chris Wallace), Tim Russert always tried to find and report the truth, even if his own limitations or blinders failed him at times. He was a trustee of the Newseum. and according to the NBC and MSNBC anchors and reporters remembering him as I write this, was the driving figure in getting the interactive museum of news from its Arlington, VA home to a plum $450 million new home on Pennsylvania Avenue at Sixth Street NW in Washington, DC. He exhorted his colleagues every day to go out and get the story, whatever the story was. And this is to say nothing about the strong family life he maintained, in public, which is something a lot of less-visible reporters with cushy jobs can't manage to do.
Outside of journalism, Russert is probably best known for his devotion to his father, "Big Russ," a prominent player in his 2004 biography Big Russ and Me. He followed that with Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons. Family, and especially father-child relationships, were a major focus of Russert's life: he had just returned to NBC News in Washington from a vacation with his family in Italy to celebrate his son's graduation from college. His wife and son were still there earlier today—Russert had come back to Washington for his weekend duties. He had already taped this weekend's episode of The Tim Russert Show for MSNBC, and I imagine it will air as scheduled at 11 AM CDT tomorrow, as tape stopped just a few hours before his passing. According to NBC News, he was recording a voice-over promo for this Sunday's Meet the Press when he collapsed and died—two days before Fathers Day.
When I look at a lot of these guys who have news blinders in specific areas, I want them off the air in favor of better reporters. Russert is one of those that, like Olbermann, I just wanted to get better. Once you get on the inside of anything, it's more difficult than you can imagine to get those blinders off. I'm not even close to suggesting I always can, or that I usually even come close, despite trying. But you can tell that Russert valued, above all else, the presentation and explanation of facts to the American people, particularly about government, how it works, who makes the decisions, and why they decide what they do.
It's easy for me to sit in the middle of nowhere, having had my ego destroyed rather thoroughly, and criticize others for letting their own egos get in the way when it still happens to me at times (probably more times than I know). Timothy John Russert, Jr. was imperfect, and didn't see some of the big things he should have seen. Yet, in a lot of ways, it's that the rest of his work was so good that made us ache for him to fix all the flaws, that in knowing and understanding more we might be—we could be—a more perfect union.
Tim Russert was 58.
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