Russert Redux

In the month since Tim Russert’s death, there have been many laudatory appraisals of the NBC anchor’s career, but there has also been a counterchorus asking whether he was really a model journalist. After I threw in with the former, a friend and former theology professor of mine, Mark Chmiel, sent me a column from the latter by Alexander Cockburn.

Here’s the nut:

Was Russert so extraordinary a fellow, to elicit so tumultuous a farewell? Surely not. He could be a sharp interviewer, but I can’t remember any occasions when I said to myself, ‘Russert has given me a whole new insight into the way the world works.’ There are many journalists and broadcasters I would put miles ahead of him.

…

Russert had the power, the clout and the venue to ask tough questions in the run-up to the war in Iraq which began in March, 2003. There were plenty of serious people with informed views about whether or not Saddam Hussein really had nuclear missile to level London and bio-weapons to kill millions. But Russert was part of the Amen Chorus for a war that sent countless men, women and children to their deaths. When it mattered, he entertained no dangerous differences with the White House line. Was this a performance worthy of ‘a true American patriot’?

Did this ‘true American patriot’ commanding the attention of millions every week not open his mouth to lament the fact that the U.S. government has been trashing the Constitution and tossing the Bill of Rights in the toilet? Negative on that one too.

We’ve had seven years of craven, culpable journalism — across the mainstream board. No one honors the reporters at Knight Ridder newspapers, who were among the few ones in the mainstream press, pre-war, to hammer away at the WMD lies. They never led off Russert’s or anyone else’s show. Russert was managing editor and host of Meet the Press, host of The Tim Russert Show on MSNBC, senior vp of NBC News, NBC Washington Bureau Chief, and regular political analyst on the Today Show, The Nightly News. So he was as responsible as anyone for the press collusion with the Administration. But now that the administration is looking bad, he’s not a collaborator but a tenacious knight, jousting with them, ‘truth-telling,’ getting ‘the bad guys’ for ‘we, the people.’

As I typed my remarks about Russert, the thought did cross my mind more than once that he was part of the mainstream journalism behemoth that lumbered right along with President Bush in the months before the invasion of Iraq, and that perhaps that was worth mentioning.

I don’t know why I didn’t, exactly, but it was probably because I didn’t really watch his show back then. Actually, I can’t remember the last time I’ve watched a full episode of Meet the Press. On a good Sunday morning, I’m usually flipping between CBS and NBC to see if I can catch any juicy quotes (unlikely) while I read real news in the papers and online.

I think that’s how most people do it. Let’s face it, the shows that actually hook current elected officials and policy advisors are often just elaborate tape recorders for political blather. They have to be. Powerful people — whether they are or not — usually have to behave like intellectual morons when they’re in public because it’s just too damn costly not too. Why nod when you can wink, right? So you get the chair of the suchandsuch committee on there and ask him about soldiers in Iraq pulling some bullshit like Abu Ghraib and this guy with a law degree from Yale comes on like old pappy suckin on a corncob pipe in front of the general store — “Well, ya know, sometimes a few rotten apples….” — while meanwhile The New Yorker in my lap has Sy Hersh blowing open the whole story in painful detail and in the Times Magazine Susan Sontag has written 4,000 words on torture and why the administration’s talkingpoints, so faithfully delivered by Senator Milquetoast, are a shameful copout.

Yes, this is your average Sunday morning on the Big Three. That’s how it goes when you interview department heads and committee chairs. And it’s why everyone is actually reading the Washington Post article that anonymously quotes two of the senator’s aids and a policy expert from the Pentagon and actually says what is happening.

If your show had a reputation for talking honestly about what happened in Washington, the Faces wouldn’t come anywhere near it for fear of telling one too many lies or getting caught on camera stubbornly — and suspiciously — refusing to answer a question like a kid in the principal’s office. And those people who’ll talk about what’s really going on? Well, having every other guest filmed in a dark room with his or her voice altered until it sounds something like Buffalo Bill’s doesn’t exactly make for good television.

Is this, too, a copout? Perhaps. If Judy Miller got canned for dangerously sloppy reporting, Russert and everyone else probably should have gotten canned for passing it out, unvetted.

But I don’t entirely condemn Russert’s style. There are different types of journalists, and to be a good one you don’t necessarily have to be a gadfly — in fact, for every gadfly, there needs to be a fly on the wall, someone who has made his or her reputation for getting the facts right but also eschewing any biases, someone who watches and notes and produces those quotes that seem innocuous enough until the muckrakers dig up the real story and then the Russerts and the Bob Schieffers don’t have to say “You’re a liar!” when what’s-his-face comes back on the show — they just have to play the tape.

This probably isn’t a satisfying explanation for Alexander Cockburn, and that’s because he’s one of those beautiful muckrakers, as is Lewis Lapham, former Harper’s editor, who in a recent New York magazine sidebar quipped that Russert was “essentially a shill for the government.” That’s fine; we need them just the way they are. But we also need responsible people to do the other kind of journalism.

It’s worth noting that the last seven and a half years have been particularly stupefying — and if you’re the stenographer you don’t have much control over that but nonetheless come off looking just as addle. (One of the great hopes Barack Obama brings with him is that the dialogue between politicians and the public (or at least the news media) will be a little less moronic than it has been. One of the things a President Obama must do is be courageous enough to sit with the more cantankerous members of the fourth estate and answer their questions honestly. He owes us that much, after the farcical press conferences old 43 has put us through.)

Yes, maybe Russert could have been a little punchier. And, yes, he and a whole slew of popular journalists should have probably lost their jobs over the Iraq debacle. Just because your bosses and colleagues all committed the same mistake you did doesn’t mean you can all just take a pass.

But, more generally, so long as politicians will only sit with amicable journalists, I’d rather those journalists know what the hell they’re talking about, even if they can’t say it out loud. I stand by what I wrote a month ago, that Russert had a gift for making complex politics important by distilling its essence rather than diluting it into sensational blather. This gift came out most in his campaign coverage, which is a different kind of journalism than I’ve been discussing and maybe his most important contribution to the airwaves. I would have preferred he did more of that and fewer Sunday morning shills. Still, I’d rather have him conduct a dozen snoozers for that one zinger than turn on my TV every Sunday morning and see some bubbly FoxNewsette giggling with cabinet secretaries about, you know, whatever you want to talk about.

And that, for now, is the way it is.

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