The Death of Tim Russert

I know I shouldn't start criticizing the guy when his body isn't even cold yet and I understand the deification of him among his colleagues. I'm sure he was a really nice guy and a pleasure to work with. But watching this one NBC correspondent try to defend Russert's non-journalism regarding the Iraq war is absolutely ludicrous. He was saying things like "It was impossible to know at the time that Dick Cheney's assessments of the war would be wrong" or "Tim had the patience to let the history unfold and show the truth," just pushed me too far.

Tim Russert was bad at his job. He was a prime example of the problem with establishment media. As the NBC News Washington Bureau Chief and as the moderator of Meet the Press, he had the latitude to ask tough questions and not worry about his job or if his show would be able to bring back guests. But when Donald Rumsfeld said something like "We know where [the WMDs] are; they're to the north, south, east, and west of Tikrit," Russert didn't respond, "So is everything else. You just named all four cardinal directions."

Russert either didn't put 2 and 2 together or just didn't care when he had Cheney on Meet the Press and Cheney cited the story about WMDs in The New York Times when it was the Bush administration that planted that story.

I'm truly sorry that his friends and family have lost this important person in their lives, but the man was a bad journalist and we should be worried if more choose to follow his path of non-confrontation, pumping petty image-attacks, and putting politics before policy.

That was never my position. My position is that he didn't push when he had the space to do so. He wasn't some newbie that could lose his job if he did challenge Rumsfeld or Cheney. I would have done it less respectfully but I have no doubt that he could have followed-up his questions and not been offensive in doing so.

The problem about the Iraq War is that it wasn't a matter of opinions. There was the truth and there was the lie and the best I can give him is that perhaps he was still in a post-9/11 haze and didn't think that a U.S. Presidential administration would lie us into an unnecessary war.

Russert was always focusing on politics and never on policy. So rather than ask a question regarding the restoration of habeus corpus or perhaps closing down Guantanamo Bay, he asks questions about whether Barack Obama renounces, rejects, defeats, destroys Louis Farrakahan. And he did a similar thing back in 1988 with Michael Dukakis and his question about if Dukakis would still oppose the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered? Andrea Mitchell was fawning over this question as if that was tough journalism when really it was all about the game of politics and perception. He didn't mind repeating smears or repeating leaked information because for him, that was the game. There was no introspection. There was just The Game and I think his approach became emblematic of our broken media.

Watching this coverage of his life on MSNBC, it becomes very clear that Russert was a nice guy and an enthusiastic guy, but he wasn't a journalist. He rarely followed-up and he was just as vulnerable to over-reacting to the right's accusations of liberal-bias as most of the mainstream media. Mr. Russet was objective in the same way that a hand-puppet is objective. He didn't espouse his own opinions but he never seemed to stop and question if he was being used as a tool to express the opinions of others.

The game of politics is entertaining but Russert put that game ahead of all else, at the expense of digging for the truth and asking question of substance and policy rather than of persona and relation to the American psyche.

Really, because I thought the Bush administration was responsible for us going into Iraq.

We all remember 9/11 and we all know that there was a lot of uncertainty. However, America was united in the invasion of Afghanistan and removing the Taliban and hunting down Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. But maybe you forgot the massive protests on the day the war started or that no one in the media seemed to be asking obvious questions like "Why would a jihadist extremist like Bin Laden team up with a secular dictator like Saddam Hussein as opposed to, oh, I don't know, Saudi Arabia where Bin Laden was born and where 17 or the 19 hijackers were from. Oh shit, they have the oil we need...nevermind.

A journalist (the capitalization is irrelevant) does probe for truth and one of the key complaints against Russert is that he never did that. He would take a step in the direction of the truth but he just couldn't seem to follow-up; to point out that these politicians were contradicting themselves or expertise that didn't agree with their wishful thinking.

Again, I don't mean to cast disgrace on Russert as a man. As I've said previously, he seemed like a nice and well-liked guy. But I find his legacy disturbing and worthy of discussion.

That's what I've been saying.

I'll just close out with a quote: