Actually, I think that the late Ernie Pyle wrote that way, which was why soldiers and Marines loved him and his work; he wrote from the heart and conveyed his emotional attachment to the troops he was covering and living with on the front lines. Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist was much the same, saying with amusing and often satirical pictures and words what some said only with words.

The modern “objective” journalists are a far cry from the men and women who could cover a story and report all the sides, not just the side that their corporate masters tell then will sell the most laundry detergent and cologne.

What a lovely thought. That all of life should be honored and not wasted for the macho longings of an underdeveloped sociopath. Yes, those lost sons and daughters should be mourned along with the misadventure of our country.

Is PBS the only TV news entity that recognizes anything about the troops’ deaths? Even that seems inadequate, but it’s something in a time that journalists don’t seem to be “allowed” to report much on the human cost of this “war”.

Grief is very personal and of course you would should more emotion at losing someone you know well vs. someone you don’t. But the celebrity journalists are a narcissisic bunch who feel that they are doing a great job, thank you, when it comes to covering the reasons for the war and how the war is being managed.

I wouldn’t expect a Brian Williams, esp. Brian Williams to be able to connect this event, the passing of Tim Russert to the deaths around him in any meaningful way.

Frankly I believe that the Bush Administration has cheapened life everywhere in the world, from New Orleans, NYC, Iowa, to the middle east and beyond. Life is cheap except when you are one of the GOP ruling club.

you are exactly right. Loss of life is loss of life and we categorize it into boxes some of which we care about and some we don’t. I think that is wrong.

skippy agrees w/john cole at balloon juice: russert wasn’t the pope, fer cryininthesink, get a grip.

Further proof that the mainstream media is merely the marketing division of their parent corporations, and journalists merely marketing representatives. Mourn the soldiers? You might as well expect to hear bad news announced at a corporate stockholders’ meeting.

“I know it’s possibly a subversive thought and heaven forbid – but – what if in journalism — mourning – not to mention expressing feeling wasn’t saved up just for journalists? What then, do you think?”

not a subversive thought, but a compassionate and ethical one :-) thank you

Sorry,

the only thing potato-head apparently was good for was giving bjs to “unnamed spokespeople” and being in Cheney’s pocket.

His passing has no standing when compared to the troops.

and, believe me, Brian William’s (as well as any other talking head) “eulogy” is simply about himself, a masturbatory praise to his own, future passing.

I guess I got out of bed too early this morning to suffer fools.

Tim was in the peer group of the other TV journos so that is why they are all sad. An Iraq father doesn’t atttend the same cocktail weenie circuit as a Tim Russert. They could care less.

Russert’s premature death from heart disease was self inflicted and preventable! So to were the death of many Americans, Iraqis and quite possibly the US Constitution!

Good Afternoon Laura -

there were numerous projectiles flung at the teevee with that comment.

OT - Tiger wins his playoff just in time to give this post my undivided attention.

You know, there was so much anger here about insults to Chelsea and also to HRC. I really do not we fare so well here either with the ongoing insults to Russert. Enough, already.

Jane is upstairs with some bad news…

Tim Russert is an important figure in understanding what went so horrifically wrong and why. And as Laura points out in her post what is so wrong with the medias reaction of it’s own loss compared to millions of innocents. If we cannot be honest and merciless in our critique of the last seven/eight years of his (and many many others) career, we will surely repeat it, quite likely before this years end.

I caught heat for making a similar point when Russert’s death was announced. Russert was not a nice man. He was like most in the media an enthusiastic enabler of the worst President and Presidency in our history. For this he was richly even obscenely rewarded.

I just got through watching “Good night and good luck” about Edward R. Murrow. Russert was no Murrow. To even compare the two or Brian Williams, or Katie Couric, or Charlie Gibson, Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer is laughable.

It was shocking to lose someone so young, one of their colleagues.

Reporters do best when they are one step removed from the story, in my opinion. It’s like doing surgery, if you start thinking about what you’re doing you won’t be able to act.

But it was not possible this time. They lost one of their own. And what should they have done, nothing? Pretended everything was fine?

I was astonished that the folks at MSNBC were able to choke out whole sentences in reporting their collective grief. My hat is off to them.

My father died at 48 heart disease preventable because in part he was workaholic! Mr. Russert worked all the time, from all accounts. To say Mr Russert’s premature passing was preventable, is not an insult. It is probable fact! The tragedy is Russert’s passing, the result of the nation’s #1 Killer.. Heart disease!!! This is the insult many American families realize…. to late!

No, I don’t think choking up will do the trick.

I heard CBS’ Schieffer do a testimonial to Tim Russert. Schieffer said that Russert was a real journalist who did his homework. But what was Schieffer’s and Russert’s idea of ‘homework’?

Why, Schieffer said, when Russert would prepare for an interview, he would watch and listen to everything the subject had ever said, he would know every thing that the subject had uttered since kindergarten. Or he said something close to that.

Furthermore, Shcieffer said, Russert did it all HIMSELF, he didn’t have some interns or flunkies doing it.

So, intense hours spent in that kind of rote time wasting is what killed the poor man. He may have worked himself to death putting in relenetless, pointless hours, pursuing journalism as a sterile and uninformative ‘gotcha’ game. That would be a very sad waste.

So, it’s not just Russert. It is a whole bunch of misguided people throughtou the profession. The have a very inadequate view of what their profession is and requires.

Shieffer didn’t say anything about critical understanding the issues from different points of view, of having a master of facts, he didn’t say anything about the ability to put the ‘gotchas’ in context. That is sad.

I know it’s possibly a subversive thought and heaven forbid – but – what if in journalism — mourning – not to mention expressing feeling wasn’t saved up just for journalists? What then, do you think?

What a radical idea. No cocktail weenies for you, my lass….

First, I want to thank you for your outstanding series of thought-provoking interviews on Grittv. It’s a very important project that deserves all the support in the world.

Second, Tim Russert was the bossman, answerable, of course, to his own bosses, and he set the standard for American political journalism on teevee, a standard which was perfectly attuned to the needs and desires of his bosses.

That’s where the overwhelming grief on the air is coming from. Russert embodied everything the Palace Courtier media was supposed to be, and he modeled everything his many acolytes strove to emulate. For them, the loss is incalculable.

The McClatchy series on the sweeping up of, brutalizing, and from time to time liquidating Afghans and Iraqis and others in the Endless War On Terror doesn’t penetrate the walls around Palace Courtiers. They don’t even know it exists, how could they be sympathetic? If it isn’t on Drudge…

As for all the millions of rounded up, dead, injured and/or displaced Iraqis and Afghans, yes? The Palace Courtier Media is aware of them, at least some of them, but for the most part only as abstractions, a blood puddle in the street that a stringer got tape of, parts strewn about, yet another screaming woman. All of it is abstract to them; there are no Real People outside the confines of the Palace, this they know. So grief for the dead Iraqi? No. Hardly grief. Pity maybe. Not grief. They aren’t even real.

That’s not to say that some can’t be touched. Richard Engle has often appeared to be touched deeply by the horrors he has witnessed, and by the loss of friends — Arab friends, gee, imagine it — in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Remember Daniel Sites? He was clearly moved by what he witnessed in Fallujah.

Engle is being lured into the Palace; Sites stays out in the field.

And the keening in the Palace will continue until someone else comes along to fill those Giant Shoes Mr. Russert left.

Is has been interesting. Keith Olberman got upset when some diarist complained that Russert was not made of gold. And other diarists have wondered why the non-stop mourning. I suspect that what we see is the usual need to mourn and vent and grieve one of those people who are with you everyday. There might be a loss of objectivity there since we the viewers only see them once or maybe twice (depending on election coverage!) a week for a few moments. We have no rapport with the fellow (although some viewers become very attached to personalities) for the most part and there isn’t as big a hole in our lives.

I notice, too, that there seems to be an unseemly rush to fill that void with another personality and move on which seems strangely at odds with the mourning and defending the record. I don’t know why they couldn’t audition folks for a quarter of a year rather than rush to fill the spot with some loyal insider. I betcha the spot could evolve to something really fascinating if it were allowed to be developed.

It is not easy getting over the loss of one of our village idiots, but we must endure. However, Amy Goodman is now on GE TV. Timmy is hardly gone and the dirty hippies are sneaking into his neo-con empire. What next? Arianna?

Every Sunday, Stephanopolis on ABC runs the names of the troops who died the previous week.

Empathy. If someone of one of your tribes of friends and family died, you would grieve much more than over any of the myriad others who died that day. And the limits of empathy.

Journalism is self-obsessed. They think we care about their personal lives, corny stories about their dads, their hobbies. Did you know Contessa Brewer of MSNBC enjoys karaoke? And Chris Jansing likes baking brownies! I learned that from a promotional spot.
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If they run out of gossip to share, they can mine YouTube for goofball videos to share with us. Good thing we got High Def so we can really see those cellphone clips really BIG!

The nonstop eulogizing of Russert from Friday through to today became especially galling to those of us in the flooded Midwest who are tuned in to the news to learn of business & road closures, more tornado warnings, homes being flooded across multiple states. This was what was on our minds all last week and yet the news people could not stop talking about Russert. NOTHING ELSE EXISTED!

It became a morbid and infuriating joke for us to flip on the TV with the comment, “Let’s see if there’s any update on Russert’s condition” because we knew they would not be paying any attention to our sodden, muddy part of the world. Now they are exploiting his son for sentimental content.

Thank you Laura! My sentiments exactly.

I’m blessed w/ KPFA radio where I live. On the Sun. nite news broadcast, they had Ben Bagdikian (amazing he’s still alive, when the original Media Monopoly probably came out in what, 1978?). Anyway, he commented on the degeneration of American broadcast media in terms of substance over the last few decades, and the nicest thing he could say about Timmeh! was that he “was not the worst among” the corporate elite talking heads.

I think that will be the best legacy Timmeh could have. He may have been kind to individual friends and family members, and good to “pals” like torturer Cheney, but his concern for, or even awareness of, the “little people”, both American and non-, killed, wounded or made refugees by our vicious Imperial policies was apparently nil.