Russert

My piece for my friends on Tim Russert

It was only a few years ago that television was chock-full of great journalists America knew by face and voice; these men included David Brinkley, Peter Jennings, along with the "60 Minutes" heydays of Morley Safer, Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. Along with those figures, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, and before John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite. Of the men still alive, all of whom have long since passed their most critical hours, where they tapped the vein of newsworthy zeitgeist like an intravenous drip.

Since that time the best journalists have been comedians save for Tim Russert, who's "Meet The Press" became the only incandescent force in the Sunday talking head circuit. All the famous interviews of politicians had two voices, one as recognizable as the other; Cronkite interviewed Kennedy on the patio outside the Oval Office, David Frost with Dick Nixon on "Frost Report," Ronald Reagan with Jim Lehrer in the office. With Tim Russert we got two presidents multiple times, most famously with Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992 after the Gennifer Flowers incident before Bill was the nominee, or with George W. Bush in the Oval Office a year after we went to war with Hussein in Iraq. Along with these two-term presidents, we have a plenitude of interviews with the two presumptive candidates in Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama by Russert, all of which will serve as the template for proper cutting-edge journalism and be taught and studied for a long time to come to anyone serious about the profession.

When I was a little boy I used to watch the Sunday talking heads with my father every Sunday. My first words ever, I swear, were "AT&T Right Choice," because AT&T bought all the advertisements on "This Week with David Brinkley" and "The McLaughlin Group," our two favorite shows (please, I implore you to ask my father or mother about those first words, they were all I said for a good portion of my early childhood). Russert was good but Brinkley was of the old school and seemed a little crustier enough that he stuck to our television as his time winded down. Soon it became apparent that Dad was missing some great interviews in Russert, so we retired Brinkley before he did around 1996. We rarely went to church, so my sermons came from the contrarian journalists who broadcast on that day of the week. My sermons were to ask questions, to never settle for ideology or complacency. Tim Russert was my pastor from 1995 until 2004, when my hangovers sermonized that I should turn to the bible sitting above my head on top of the toilet bowl at Emerson. The last few years I re-familiarized with the man, deeply religious, a man who loved his father and his family, but more important than ever he was the man who never gave in to the people across from him, which is the most important lesson one can learn on a Sunday, or any other day for that matter.