Monday, June 23, 2008
News / News Bites Vacation dispatch: Canadian columnist sneers at Tim Russert and his celebrity mourners
Posted by Michael Miner on 06.23.08 at 09:23 PM
A nastily contrariwise way of remembering Tim Russert was published Friday in Canada's most important newspaper, the Globe and Mail, by one of its best-known columnists, Rick Salutin. Russert was a familiar face on the TV screens of millions of Canadians, but even so he was a foreigner, and Salutin examined him phenomenologically, as Canadian intellectuals like to examine Americans. Russert "had a gotcha style based on confronting his guests with things they had said, but I don't recall him ever challenging them on basic political issues or values," Salutin told Canada. But to the "superstars of the news media . . . he was their substitute real person," their street cred, "a link to the real world, now lost so far below their aerie of vast wealth, limos, blow-dried haircuts. . . . He looked like a news hound [though Salutin said he wasn't], and acted as if that was his metier, like a fish in water."
In short, Salutin described Russert as just marginally less fraudulent than his mourners, passengers sailing first class on a ship of fools. "There was nostalgia," he wrote. "Someone called Tim Russert 'an Irish cop on a corner in a neighbourhood called America.' In the impending era of Obama, it sounded like a longing for an all-white America that never was. The U.S. of Going My Way, with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as Irish priests."
Only a foreign correspondent trafficking in iconoclasm and cliche for the audience back home can sound so smart and so stupid at the same time. "Insiders" mourned Russert by "preening happily together," Salutin told Canada, but outsiders are past being taken in by that crowd -- the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins, in particular, shows "the proper lack of respect." To Salutin, Linkins is a man of the future, those media superstars an elite of empty suits vanishing before our eyes. "With [their] nostalgia goes a sense of menace, from the Internet, and bloggers like Jason Linkins, who ridicule the media luminaries to bits," said Salutin of this anxious elite. "They may still have the perks, but they've lost forever the deference."
It's Salutin's notion of the Internet that made me think twice -- his idea of the 'Net as a sort of frontier where plain truths are spoken, grit is capital, and fancy pants are hooted out of town. Maybe for the moment that's so, but frontiers get settled, order gets imposed, and pecking orders establish themselves. In a world of blogging equals Ariana Huffington, for one, clearly regards herself already as more equal than others. And she's announced that she intends to expand the Huffington Post into local news, beginning with a site dedicated to Chicago. She's on her way to becoming the William Randolph Hearst of the blogosphere.
The 'Net will produce its own superstars, and deference will be paid. And in time someone else will wonder what these prima donnas at their terminals know about the real world, and won't mind being rude about it.
Comments (6)
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Tim Russert was a superb journalist, and he will be missed, especially in the coming presidential campaign. But the coverage of his death was waaaaaay overdone. You'd have thought the pope or the president died -- except they probably wouldn't have gotten as good treatment. What an exercise in media self-aggrandizement the coverage was. Enough already!
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I, too, respected Russert (and will miss him the rest of this election season)...AND I thought the coverage went obviously (and, at first, surprisingly) long and deep... But I think the real reason behind all of that was Russert's apparently almost unique level of being loved by colleagues and strongly liked by competitors and even most interviewees. This guy truly floated above it all. Jennings' passing didn't get near this handling, and I doubt Brokaw's will and I know Rather's won't. (Cronkite's would be closer, certainly out of historical impact.) Add the internal journalist / broadcaster thing (making it such a big thing in their own daily vision and wheelhouse)...and it became a bit of a "perfect storm" of genuine (if smile-soaked) mourning...
Besides Bill Moyers, there isn't a (serious) television news journalist I would swerve to avoid hitting. Tim Russert and his shallow, gotcha show wasn't interesting to me, so all the rending of hair shirts after his unfortunate death got tiresome quickly. George Carlin deserves all the accolades and more - there was someone who spoke truth to power (albeit not to their face). Maybe because I was born in Canada all those many years ago? Ahem.
Russert's avuncular looks played no small part in his popularity. Meanwhile, no woman who'd be as fat as he was would ever appear on network TV news.
"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." http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c061708.htm And then there's this:
Carlotta (above) makes an interesting point about physical appearance. Indeed, the only plus-size woman I can think of on TV news is the estimable Candy Crowley (sp?), and she appears on cable's CNN. Rachel Maddow, who's been subbing for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, is also a little zaftig, but again, she's only seen on cable (MSNBC).
