On Russert: Has Enough Time Passed?

The tragic and untimely death of TV personality Tim Russert, longtime host of NBC's Sunday morning public affairs program Meet the Press, stirred emotional responses from across the aisle and across the globe.

Russert spent a lifetime in the public eye, and he will be missed. And certainly the nature of Russert's sudden, unexpected death added to the shock and outpouring of grief. But at times, the canonization of St. Tim started to feel a little too much like this spectacle:


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As noted by Alaxander Cockburn in a column for The Nation, "If Russert had rocked the boat in any serious way, he'd have had more enemies."

One of my clearest memories of Russert goes back to George W. Bush's 2005 State of the Union address, which sticks out because of the singularly rare event when the Democrats actually started booing the president during the part of the speech when Bush set 2047 as the date specific that Social Security would "go bankrupt" unless his radical privatization plan was adopted.

There were a lot of reasons for the Democrats to react viscerally to Bush's spin, including but not limited to:
* Bush's outright lie that handing Social Security funds over to the wolves of Wall Street was the only was to "preserve" it.
* The galling irony that the guy who raided the surplus with tax giveaways to the wealthy, a "preemptive" war and borrow-and-spend legislation is now demanding he be allowed to "fix" it... or else.

There were a lot of reasons to react forcefully to Bush's galling lie. But Russert opted to blame the Democrats' "frustration with not being able to beat Bush in a fair election." It was probably one of the single-most glaring one-sentence examples of the "aging, bloated, mainstream media" that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog likes to mock. And it inspired this cartoon:


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Russert may not mind having the president of the United States lie to his face, but some people, and I'll include those Democrats in attendance at that speech, don't take too kindly to that kind of thing, especially from so-called public servants.

But Russert had a lot of practice letting people lie to him. That's probably why when the Bush Administration wanted to disseminate its misinformation about the need to invade Iraq it chose Russert's Meet the Press as the vehicle for Vice President Dick Cheney's performance.

First Cheney and his henchmen fed the lies to Judith Miller at The New York Times. Then Cheney went on Meet the Press and used those same Times reports to bolster his case. Russert took it all in without question, as did the millions in his audience.

It's true, as Russert's fans like to recall, he later would throw those words back in Cheney's face after time and events exposed them as absurdities. But it was just a little too late by then, wasn't it? Russert and Meet the Press had already been used and the country was at war. There were many sincere and serious voices questioning the administration's case for invading Iraq, unfortunately those voices rarely got much airtime at Russert's Meet the Press or Brokaw's Nightly News as they helped conduct the country's jingoistic march to Baghdad.

Russert may have been one of the the best that TV journalism had. But that's probably less a tribute to Russert than it is an indictment of TV journalism.