The important personage was free to choose from a menu offering three forms of response—silence, spin, rancid lie. If silence, Russert moved on to another topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if rancid lie, he swallowed it. The highlight reels for the most part show him in the act of swallowing . . .

I don’t doubt that Russert was as good at the game as anybody in Washington, but why the five-star goodbye? Why the scattering of incense for a journalist who so prided himself on being in the loop that off-camera he assured his informed sources that nothing they said was on the record? For a second-tier talk-show host, his audience a fraction of the size of Rush Limbaugh’s or Howard Stern’s, whose stock in trade was the deftly pulled punch? Why a requiem mass for a pet canary?

Lapham’s article is worth a full read. Truly, whatever was being celebrated about Russert, it wasn’t first rate journalism.

This is unwarranted praise of Diana-esque proportions. See here.

Some might think that we should not speak ill of the dead. I wouldn’t have written anything at all, except that Tim Russert has been hoisted onto every available pedestal when he was actually a big part of the problem: media excelling at trying to LOOK LIKE it is doing its job rather than doing its job.

It’s a tragedy that he died so suddenly, but this sort of practice is the opposite of what responsible journalism should be. Russert, like many other members of the mainstream media, had come to value the friendship of the rich and powerful more than he valued telling the public the truth about what they were doing. I’m sorry that he’s deceased, but I wish he had used his power more wisely when he had the chance.