Respect for the man aside, there’s a matter of respecting journalism when assessing Russert’s place in the trade. That respect has been lacking in the almost universally fawning tributes to Russert and the craft he represented. Journalists and politicians from the president on down have formed yet another procession of praise and prostrations worthy of, say, Diana or Elvis. But Tim Russert?
That’s what journalism as we know it today is, primarily: an adjunct to the cult of celebrity, a shareholder in the business of image management to protect, foremost, the business of America. When the powerful pay tribute to Russert (”he was an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades,” were President Bush’s autopilot words) they’re paying tribute to themselves — to the establishment Russert represented, defended and, unfortunately for us, encrusted.
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... Since the Age of Reagan, the perception of tough journalism has paralleled the perception of integrity in politics when, all along, politics and journalism have been complicit in legitimizing spin — interpretation ahead of fact. In more honest days, we’d call that propaganda. But that’s one of those “shrill” words not to be used in polite company, and Russert’s court was nothing if not a weekly oath to the appropriate.
The late Michael Kelly, a reporter and editor whose death in Iraq in 2003 was to my mind a greater blow to journalism than Russert’s, described this in a piece for The New York Times Magazine in 1993 (two years into Russert’s stint at “Meet”): “On the Sunday talk shows, the celebrity host and the celebrity reporter and the celebrity political strategist sit side by side, and the distinctions between them are not apparent to the naked eye. In effect, they are one, members of the faith, the stars of a culture they themselves have created. Indeed, they have acknowledged their oneness. They have given themselves a name, the Insiders, and a language. The language reveals, as all languages do, a great deal about how its speakers see themselves and the world. It is self-referential, self-important, self-mocking and very nearly (if subconsciously) self-loathing. It is deeply cynical. It portrays a society where to be knowing is to admit the fraud of one’s functions in the act of performing them.” At least, they have the loathing right.
[I've gotten the impression that McCain's overt cynicism of the political process endears him to reporters and has helped establish him, in their eyes, to be the "straight-talking maverick']
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The truth is that on any night of the week Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” does more in a two-minute segment to show in politicians’ own words how venal, dishonest, contradictory and just plain dense they can be than Russert did in his Sunday services. Russert’s master was always the political structure he grilled, but never fundamentally questioned. You always knew whose side he was on: power, not truth — and, by power, I don’t mean his own, of which he had plenty, but the powerful men and occasional women he invited to his Versailles.
I mourn his death. But I wish I could mourn the death of the journalism he represented. To the detriment of journalism and malinformed citizens, that parody lives on.
