I'm sorry for the offense the following may give some posters.
This is what commenter "Oregon Activist" wrote on
the TPM thread about Russert's death, in three separate posts, in response to others:
Quote:It's one thing to express sympathy for family, friends and colleagues. They are surely devastated and he will leave an unfathomable hole in their lives. I am certain that he worked long hard hours and did his best as he saw it.
But, I cannot stand to see over and over and over "the best journalist in America" sentimentally awarded to someone who had no hard questions for George Bush, Dick Cheney or the architects of war, who warned Karl Rove and protected him in the Plame affair. Someone whom the White House identified as their best forum because they can control the message. That cannot be the best we aspire to. That cannot be our standard of integrity.
Yes, honor him for his humor, his long hours of work, his energy. Please don't lower the standard to where he is "the best" and please, don't compare him to Murrow or others who truly stood up to power.
---
People are practicing the traditional American rite of praising the dead - no matter what the truth is or how false the praise. It's like when Nixon died. It's a ritual. [..] If you remind people of his role in the Plame affair and his tip off to Rove that kept Rove out of trouble, you are a bad person. That's the American way. You can do daily harm to the cause of journalism, but die and overnight you become Murrow, even though you were more of a Winchell the day before.
That said, this is sudden, shocking and clearly difficult for his friends, family and coworkers who deserve sympathetic understanding.
---
I don't mind the folks at NBC going overboard in their praise - or even Josh and the other people in journalism who knew him. That's as it should be.
It's the torrent of praise from the rest of us - the news watchers, the news consumers. We were the ones his cozy relationship with his sources damaged. We were the ones he misled. If you want to see true over-the-top rites of mourning, read the comments at the New York Times where soon they will begin petitioning for sainthood. Still, even here among people who did not support the war, they seems to be this automatic erasure of the incredibly poor work he did during that time.
It's a personal tragedy, not a national tragedy. It's sad that one of the preeminent political junkies won't get to cover such an historic election. Sad for him. For us, well perhaps then we won't have bulldogging questions about Farrakhan for Obama and silence about Hagee for McCain, just to give one example of his "fairness" and 'integrity".
[..] It would be nice (I am not hopeful) that Meet the Press won't be the friendly forum that Dick Cheney always found it to be in the past when he starts dragging out his lies. It would be wonderful if conversations and information from sources were no longer automatically off the record unless specifically moved on the record.
Meet the Press is a venerable and respected national resource - and he helped make it that way, but he also tarnished it with his coziness with those in power.
This is what I replied, FWIW:
---
Very well said. Thank you. Here's hoping your posts will not be among those deleted.
[I wrote that b/c TPM apparently scrubbed all the negative comments in the top half of the page]
Maybe it's a cultural difference, but where I'm from no bad is said, of course, about the dead at their funeral, at the gatherings of those who were near and dear about him. But when it comes to figures of public importance, newspaper obituaries and public discussions about his death are places for a balanced and honest evaluation of their life, the role they played, for better of course but also for worse.
I found reading through the tributes to Russert an weirdly estranging experience: was this the same man they were talking of? Of course he died at a cruelly young age. I do not doubt that he was a good person. He obviously worked as hard as anyone can be expected to, and did so in the service of the profession he clearly relished. In all of those senses, his death is sad and cruel.
But here, suddenly, is conjured up this portrait of a titan of critical journalism, an embodiment of scrupled integrity -- and this about the same man who has been widely vilified this year, the last few years, for his very failures at exactly these professional values? To my sensitivities, there are fine lines between paying tribute and lionising, and between being respectful and being sanctimonious. And the way these tributes turned Russert into a hero of scrupled, critical journalism was just slightly discombobulating.
Russert?
Maybe it is a cultural difference. And maybe it has something to do with our mediatized age, where the people we see on our TV screens come to feel closer to many than their own neighbours or even colleagues - and are certainly listened to more often. The people that populate our TV landscape are invested with the kind of emotional loyalty and reaction that used to be reserved for people that, well, you actually
knew. The puzzling hysteria over Princess Diana remains the prototypical and extreme case study of this (though it's true that royal families are a bit of an exception in any case in their emotional hold on people).
The village-like universe of the self-contained media and punditry world also probably has something to do with it. They all know each other closely. In the modern age of media consolidation and concentration, where it's just a couple of companies that control the mass media and the focus of political news is more than ever all concentrated in the Beltway, they all work round about the same place. It's a self-referential world, and of course the major media anchors and minor pundits who worked with or alongside Russert will be in grief now, emotional and moved.
But this village reality is then projected onto the national audience, and now every viewer and listener is supposed to feel that Russert is not just a hard-working professional who did not deserve to die this young, but a man who loomed large in this world - whose death, as imani3000 wrote, is treated as the single most important thing that happened in the whole world this day.
You can't begrudge Russert's family the tributes, and I hope they are a comfort. But for the rest of us, there are warning signs here [..].
