As I think I mentioned when I got news of his sudden death, Tim Russert was long known as a fairly doctrinaire left-liberal Democrat, unashamedly so. But I think his genuinely blue collar roots helped him keep a perspective that some in that crowd often sorely lack, and in any case as a journalist he was one of the most scrupulously fair, yet penetrating, interviewers I’ve ever seen, and other than his love for the Buffalo Bills I never saw him get partisan on anything. So imagine my lack of surprise when I read this comment on complaints about ideological conformity in the big-league news industry:
“There’s a potential cultural bias. And I think it’s very real and very important to recognize and to deal with,” he told me. “Because of backgrounds and training you come to issues with a preconceived notion or a preordained view on subjects like abortion, gun control, campaign finance. I think many journalists growing up in the ’60s and the ’70s have to be very careful about attitudes toward government, attitudes toward the military, attitudes toward authority. It doesn’t mean there’s a rightness or a wrongness. It means you have to constantly check yourself.”
“Why the closed-mindedness when the subject comes around to media bias?” I asked him.
“That, to me, is totally contrary to who we’re supposed to be as journalists. . . . If someone suggested there was an anti-black bias, an anti-gay bias, an anti-American bias, we’d sit up and say, ‘Let’s talk about this, let’s tackle it.’ Well, if there’s a liberal bias or a cultural bias we have to sit up and tackle it and discuss it. We have got to be open to these things.”
I’m not particularly conservative myself, but I’ve often thought exactly the same way.
We need more Tim Russerts in the news media world. A lot more. We already couldn’t afford to lose the one we lost.
(Read the rest right here.)
{ 8 comments }
Idle speculation (so far) has Chris Matthews replacing Mr. Russert. From the soul of objectivity to the soul of partisanship. Let’s hope NBC has more smarts than that.
Matthews used to be brilliant. He went off the deep end some time in the last half-dozen years or so I think. Possibly on purpose. If on purpose, he might be able to get more reasonable again.
Possibly on purpose. If so, he’s a great actor. I used to respect him a lot, late 90s to early 00s. Somewhere around the 2004 election, I found he had just lost objectivity, and sometimes rationality. If he were a relative, I’d be scheduling an appointment with a psychologist after such a radical personality change.
His book, "Nixon and Kennedy," was one of the best books on mid-20th Century politics I ever read.
Its really tragic when your father passes away at age 58, as did my dad when I was 20.
I always respected Tim Russert although I never thought he was as good as his mentor, Lawrence E. Spivak.
Russert was one of only two famous grads of John Carroll University (jesuit) in Cleveland, the other being Don Shula.
(Its an inside family joke, that irks one of my siblings.)
Surely we can assume both were searching for ultimate truth in their respectives fields. (heh)
I have always found the News Hour on PBS presented much more balanced discussion of issues than you found on network or cable new programs. The News Hour seeks out advocates on different sides of an issue and it gives them more than 15 to 30 seconds to explain their position. You get much more than catch phrases and sound bites. The moderators who lead these discussions do ask questions, but they let the advocates do most of the talking. They don’t try to dominate the discussion or show how clever they are by trying to find got ya questions.
The MSM media people try too much to be the center of attention, to be the star.
Cultural bias is a very potent phenomenom. It is even more potent when the person doesn’t even recognize it.
You see this a lot in academia. Highly erudite egg-heads tend to swing left.
You see this in the military. Tough, crude warrior-mentality tend to swing right.
It’d be nice if journalists and academics actually heeded Russert’s words and practiced intellectual diversity and cultural diversity, as much as they pine for race diversity.
HB
If you ask me to come up with a neutral unbiased interviewer to take over MTP, the first one to come to my mind is Brian Lamb. I’d also bet good money that he’d never take the job.
Comments on this entry are closed.