Shafer (and Buce) on St. Tim

I was resisting saying anything about the late NBC Washsington Bureau Chief, but Slate’s Jack Shafer has a piece up on “The Canonization of Tim Russert,” which says most of what I would have wanted to say (and says it better) (link, and thanks, John). And it induces me to throw in three afterthoughts.

One, Shafer could have laid more stress on one important reason for the wall-to-wall coverage: the cable news hole. You have to have something to fill that yawning chasm of dead air. That’s why know so much about a blonde who went missing in Aruba, why every bit of political slippage is a “controversy,” and so forth. Bummer about Russert but as a(nd against my better judgment) viewer, I say thank heaven for the Iowa floods. Otherwise, we would have heard even more about St. R (come to think of it, don’t they have to prove he performed three miracles?).

Two, it’s time to say it: Russert wasn’t that great a journalist. Okay fair enough, nobody was that great a journalist. And Russert was, I grant, hard working and far better informed than the average pretty-faced chin-wagger. But at the end of the day he was a mainstay of the toxic web of journalistic clientism—the you-give-me-inside-dope, I-give-you-face-time symbiosis that has gone so much to degrade and vulgarize mainstream news coverage. It’s deadly for the polity and Russert was one of the principal purveyors of the virus, and in a very particular way: from the standpoint of his corporate masters, perhaps his most important skill was his knack for asking questions that seemed trenchant, penetrating, without ever pressing hard enough that they might have stopped people from returning his phone calls. I’ll grant you that journalism has been a mess from the get-go, but the celebrity of guys like Russert makes me pine for the era of the ink-stained wretch.

Which brings me to the third point about the canonization: it’s casting the ice axe up the canyon wall. Hey, if this guy is so great, then maybe the rest of us aren’t so bad at all. In a torrent of hot air, all egos rise at once.

Documented extra: Shafer’s piece took me back to one I had missed before: his own obituary on a beloved friend (link)—and the most savagely funny skewering of the late Richard Darman that one could possibly iimagine.