Tim Russert, dead at fifty-eight, was more than just a showman. He had gifts galore for friendship and gusto, and stamped the life around him with excitement. His Sunday ritual must have benefited from his schmoozing capacities. He was one of those live wires—they exist in every organization, in every social world and network—who functions as a distributor cap for information and initiative. “He loved his work” was said repeatedly on the in memoriam shows. (Could it be that loving your work is so rare in network news as to be worth all the emphasis?)
Meet the Press was really Meet Tim Russert, and it is hard to imagine anyone being as skilled a showman as Russert. His artful showmanship allowed him to churn up arguments, to move issues into mainstream news, to set “the agenda.” But as many critics have pointed out over the years, Meet The Press confounded the unearthing of flip-flops with the clarification of views and the unearthing of truth. Russert’s game was all too often devoted to one-liners and gotcha, and it surely succeeded at NBC’s principal mission, which is, after all, attracting eyeballs and eardrums. But it was not awfully good at vivifying the stakes of politics.
As the clips that ran on Sunday’s memorial edition of Meet the Press made clear, Russert was at his best when straightforwardly indignant—exposing David Duke’s ignorance, or putting Michael Chertoff on the spot as Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans. At other times, facing authorities, he was inclined to give credence. In the run-up to the Iraq war, he mainly tossed softballs. I’ve just reread transcripts of his interviews with Condoleezza Rice (January 19, 2003) and Colin Powell (February 9, 2003). He did tick off a few serious questions but did not press hard when his guests ducked. He channeled the baseless Whitewater story through the ’90s, and inaugurated Hillary Clinton’s run for New York’s Senate seat in 2002 with a question about her husband’s adultery.
The producers of yesterday’s memorial show chose their clips from Meet the Press exclusively, not from Russert’s more ruminative interviews on MSNBC and CNBC. Not being required on cable to punch up his show with easy-access hot-button moments, those longer interviews gave him a chance to exhibit a refreshing patience with, and curiosity about, ideas—not the ephemera of the week.
Still, his legacy is rooted in those ephemera. The Sunday shows play at political sport in a time when the decisions of Washington players make villages explode on the other side of the world. You can’t blame it all on Russert for being as good at the color commentary as he was. As John Edwards said Sunday on the Stephanopoulos show, it’s in the nature of American journalism, and of Americans, to “love a good contest.”
The untimely departure of Tim Russert points to the way in which the game he relished, the game he mastered, was limited. May his successor, whoever that may be, take the press-meet game deeper than a foamy mélange of gullibility and gotcha. That would be a worthy tribute to Tim Russert’s better angel.
