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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.