Tim Russert's Long Goodbye

Thank you, Julia Keller (and a shout out to you too, Jack Shafer).

The Chicago Tribune literature critic and the Slate.com media columnist have both recently expressed what I've been feeling in the last few days as regards the sudden death of "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert, namely that the media coverage of it has gotten waaaay out of control.

So. It's not just me.

No disrespect is intended to the memory of the late Mr. Russert or his family and friends. Given that he was not only the host of the venerable Sunday morning news show but also NBC's Washington Bureau chief, an author of best selling books celebrating his family and working-class roots, and so esteemed, not to say beloved, by his colleagues, I can't say the wall-to-wall, hour-after-hour coverage of Russert's tragic and untimely death was unexpected. But. Still.

I am old enough (just) to remember the era of 'The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" and even have a hazy memory or two of NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report ("Goodnight, David. Goodnight, Chet.") If any of those men--especially Uncle Walter, once known as The Most Trusted Man in America--had died during the time of his broadcast (Chet Huntley did die of lung cancer in 1974, four years after "Huntley-Brinkley" ended), his passing would have been marked and mourned certainly, but not, I don't think, with all the pomp and circumstance bestowed upon the late Mr. Russert.

Or maybe I'm wrong about that, particularly in Cronkite's case, but even so I doubt it would have been assumed that the public should be dragged every step of the way along the funeral route. It would have been considered inappropriate, even unseemly. These were newsmen, after all, not heads of state.

Did the dam burst of coverage following the 1997 death of Princess Diana let this genie out of the bottle? Or does it go back even further, to the period in the early 1980s when journalists-- broadcast journalists in particular--were becoming celebrities themselves, as vainglorious, pursued, gossiped about and indulged as any TV, movie or pop star? The 1979 Iranian hostage crisis gave us Ted Koppel's "Nightline", CNN, the first 24/7 cable news program, was born 1n 1980 and in 1981 Lady Di married Prince Charles... and suddenly everywhere you looked glossy magazines and a new genre of books were celebrating the evening news "stars". Even supermarket tabloids were getting in on the act; you couldn't get away from all the breathless reportage about which newscaster was being lured to and away from what network and who was now making what salary.

I don't know. But it's worth repeating the point made by Ms. Keller in her "Lit Life" piece, "The Tempest Over Tim": "Just because the media control the microphone doesn't mean we should use it to yammer on promiscuously about a fallen co-worker: You have to wonder how Russert--who, despite his occasional lapses into on-air sentimentality, was actually a hard-nosed journalist who valued intellectual rigor above raw emotion--would have handled the death of a colleague: Respectfully, to be sure, and thoroughly, but after a decent interval, he would have gotten back to work.

Back to reporting on issues such as a complicated war, an unraveling economy, an impending election."