Meet the Press
Over at the Weekly Standard‘s blog, I write up the four big Sunday morning talk shows each weekend. It’s not exhaustive, typically not too much more than brief summaries of the big issue of the week or a quote I find to be interesting. This week’s is shorter than usual, but pretty representative if you need an illustrative example.
I can’t say that Meet the Press was my favorite of these shows, but that’s only because I don’t really have a favorite–the best show any given Sunday is typically the one with the best guest. Tim Russert, however, was almost certainly the best host, and seems to have been a really great guy. I did not know him, but everyone I know who did was shocked and saddened by his passing. Some sort of memorial on this weekend’s edition of Meet the Press was both necessary and appropriate, and they handled it in a touching fashion, talking about Russert and his impact on the news for the full hour.
But, as an inside-the-beltway journalist, I have to admit to feeling a little uncomfortable with spending what is arguably the nation’s most important hour of television news paying tribute to one of our own, even one as great as Russert. There were things happening in the country, things that probably should have been covered by Meet the Press. Iowa, for starters–isn’t the flooding of the state and the destruction of that state’s corn crop, I don’t know, kind of a big deal? Kind of a really, really big deal? Especially since people around the world are already rioting over the ridiculously high price of corn and other basic foodstuffs? Isn’t there something to be said about ethanol subsidies, or how to replace that corn, or the skyrocketing price of corn? This is to say nothing of the political developments last week, which were not negligible.
Russert’s (tragic, untimely, and very sad) death is certainly news, but he got as much, if not more attention than an assassinated president would have for that hour on Meet the Press. Believe me, I’m not trying to downplay the man’s life, or his achievements, or suggest he wasn’t deserving of the attention (especially on the show he helmed for 17 years). But he was a newsman, not a newsmaker. And I think the treatment of his death is symptomatic of a press corps utterly obsessed with itself and its image. Tom Brokaw needed to host that tribute for Tim Russert because he needed to feel that people would react the same way if he died (especially if he had died while still in the anchor’s chair). I can’t help but feel that this was all kind of inappropriate.
*Apologies to Chris Wallace, George Stephanopoulos, and Bob Schieffer–you guys do great work, no doubt about it, but Russert was the gold standard.