Tim Russert and the decay of the American media

In Bill Moyers' documentary, Buying the War, Russert claims that he didn't raise sufficient doubts about what Cheney and others were telling him because critics and skeptics weren't contacting him. He tells Moyers: "To this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them."

Millions were protesting in the streets, United Nations inspectors, the International Atomic Energy Agency, various foreign governments, not to mention the World Socialist Web Site and other left-wing publications, were refuting the Bush government's claims, but none of this was accessible to Russert. In this, he's probably being honest. Attuned to what the powerful thought and considering left-wing opinion to be illegitimate, Russert only had ears for Cheney and his fellow conspirators.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jun2008/russ-j16.shtml

Once again, it all began to go wrong with the advent of television. I remember as a child looking across the room at the NBC commissary in NYC and saying, "Hey, look, there's Frank McGee" when I was only five. TV "newsmen" (more appropriately called "presenters" in the UK) should never have become celebrities, but that's what TV does. It makes you the story rather than what you're supposed to be covering. For some reason, a few minutes later, I began pouring the little sugar packets at the table at which I was seated all over my head. So Frank McGee, anyhow, did not have a "saccharine" effect on me.

Russert's Big Russ, on the other hand, was nothing but a saccharine account of an America were "traditional" values were honored, where "men were men," etc. In other words, a fictionalized America, conceived in the mind of a conformist

He stole the title of the book I was going to write about Grampi (my grandfather, Russell Laschinger, who was also known as "Big Russ" when I was little) someday.

But "100 years from now, who'll know the difference." (This was Grampi's famous quote on the evanescence and eventual irrelevance of fame and of the ephemeral nature of our quotidian lives.)

the USSR and China "constituted a significantly larger land mass, in toto, than did the United States."

This Joyce Carol Oates fictional account of subversion also hit home. As a child, I also would have supported the arrest of everyone pointing out how much larger Russia was, much less both "red" menaces combined. At that point I thought we needed to go to war and capture enough territory to make the U.S. No. 1. This was my "neocon" phase.

I can almost guarantee that Bill Moyers will not be lionized on his passing. First, you have to die young. Second, he has spoken truth to power a bit too often.