Revising and Extending on Russert

To answer my previous question about whether the press was covering the Iowa floods, I guess they've gone into 24-hour dead celebrity mode. And it's a journalist, the big Kahuna, Tim Russert, so it's likely to last a while.

There's a usual period of respect for the dead, and I'm happy to honor that. But forgive me for linking to a few things, just for the sake of background, that may pierce the gauze of today's hagiography.

Daily Howler, June 28, 2004
Daily Howler, June 30, 2004
Howard Kurtz interview with Russert
Nicholas Lemann New Yorker profile
Bill Moyers' "Buying the War," interview transcript with Russert
Dana Milbank's Washington Sketch, January 26, 2007
Matthew Yglesias, "Journalism as Sadism," November 11, 2007

Had to get it off my chest.

...let me also link Russert's final Web chat, from earlier this morning, which includes something that I wish the entire media practiced a little more.

Msnbc: Given the way people use the Internet, do you wonder if there are going to be some things said or done during the course of this campaign that will be very unsettling?

Russert: That’s what we have to be conscious of and vigilant against, particularly at the end of the campaign as things are put out there. We’ve already had a few fake videos with different words dubbed in and people say, “This must be true because I saw it on the Internet.”

What we hope to do in this campaign is recognize there are big differences on big issues between John McCain and Barack Obama – the war in Iraq, Iran, Social Security, taxes. You don’t need to get into this other stuff. If it does surface, then I think the mainstream media has an obligation not to just instinctively put it out there without vetting it. Or, if it is something that is manufactured as a virus, report on that – who did it and why. But sometimes it’s very hard to trace it back to its original source.

Looking at the end of that chat, he notes that he was scheduled to have Joe Biden and Lindsay Graham on this week. And immediately what I thought was, "Darn, that would have been a good Meet The Press." So as much as I was exasperated with him, as much as he caused me agata on numerous occasions, I'm going to miss Tim Russert on Sunday mornings.