June 2008: Grim Reaping

Newsboys hawking tabloid sheets
Posada's Popular Mexican Prints,Roberto Berdecio/Stanley Appelbaum

The canonization of Tim Russert begins June 13. Over the top, yes, but 100% predictable is the newstainment industry's wallow in the story–Russert was a big star, he was only in his 50s, his death was sudden.

But the public buys the late multi-millionaire's self-promotion as a regular guy. Just as they swallow the idea that Russert was the finest of journalists.

driftglass' assessment gets it right–

I have no standing to say a word about Tim Russert’s personal life, so I’m perfectly happy to assume that it was exemplary. Good husband, son, father, uncle and husband. Loyal friend. Picked up after his dog.

...But his professional life was another thing entirely, and no fire hose of laudatory prose from his peers -- however heartfelt -- with alter the fact that Russert was no pioneering journalist. Instead, he kept ferocious watch over the Beltway's Velvet Rope Line; keeping the Serious People Secure and In and the dirty fucking hippies Marginal and Out.

Week after week after week, Russert held his meaty thumb on the scale, insuring that only the Royalty of Bourgeois Centrism made it into the clubhouse.

driftglass covers the record on the "centrist" guests, and how the heaviest trend leans very much to the right. And his analysis of Russert's inteview technique finds that, "Russert did not practice journalism so much as he perfected a new infotainment magic trick to take the place of journalism."

Which leads driftglass to pose some questions—

So...how many important national stories were ever rooted out and broken on Meet the Press? (And no, "being forced to testify about your own ignominious role in a major national security scandal" does not qualify as "breaking" a story. Neither does "acting as a launch pad for Administration Trial Balloons")

How many traitorous douchebags were ever brought to book by a Russert journalistic crusade?

In a country where Russert is held out as the ne plus ultra of his profession, has the Mainstream Media been doing a consistently better or worse job of ferreting out the Truth over these last twenty years?

Take a wild guess: Have Americans grown more or less ignorant?

And after more of a look at Russert's record—

So, Washington insider...
Boy from Buffalo...
Network Vice President...

In the end, perhaps we can agree that Tim Russert was a Man of Many Names.

But "journalist" really wasn’t one of them.

Then a true reporter on America departed the scene, when George Carlin died on the 22nd.

Someone who couldn't have been more unlike a corporate spokesman, speaking out as he did against corporate media and the interests they represent. And, someone who said, "The owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

A line that was much quoted in the better obituaries, like John Nichols'piece, George Carlin: American Radical. There's a lot on video, but a good segment is The Owners of America.

And in metaphorical deaths this month,

House Approves Unconstitutional Surveillance Legislation

driftglass on this–No Country for Old Rights–

...our most fundamental rights to privacy are traded away for votes like baseball cards and, under a sinister bargain struck between the leaders of the Party of Darkness and the Party of Weakness, absolution will be granted to the Peeping Telcoms before a single trial has even been held, or a single word of testimony has been taken under oath.

A crime has been committed here.

A crime against our Constitution.

A crime whose seriousness and scale dwarfs the offenses that drove Nixon to resign, and yet a crime that fades into the crowd when considered alongside all of those other acts of barbarism and betrayal that have been the hallmark of Conservative rule in America.

A crime for which no one will be held responsible, just as before. As the Iran-Contra investigation was thwarted by the alliance between political power and the media, and

...as we watched the Conservative traitors drive away in limousines, laughing at our quaint belief in the Rule of Law, we swore – we swore! – we would never let it happen again.