Tim Russert Remembered: The Buffalo Truth Talker

MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - 06.17.08 - The man from Buffalo loved politics, and loved sports, Buffalo sports, in particular. 

The sudden death of Tim Russert last week left all in the political spectrum stunned. He reshaped the Sunday "Meet the Press" show on NBC into the most relevent political discourse in American politics. His research, and his depth of understanding of the political process kept his guests from turning the show into a big political infomercial.

He loved Buffalo sports. Any sport. People knew about his passion for the Bills, and even the nod to the Sabres when they were in contention, but he also took interest in the town's minor league franchise, the Buffalo Bisons.

The Bisons had a bobblehead night in his honor a couple of years back. I recall someone at that evening telling me how down-to-earth and genuine they found him, as he was signing autographs.

It was his roots in Buffalo, a town that is a tumultuous blend of the workaday world and hardball politics, that always grounded Russert's political perspective, and kept him from falling into the trap of many top journalists who become so inside themselves that they forget their role as members of the fourth estate.

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There are few in politics who were as gifted at speaking truth to power.  He inspired many journalists, myself included, to look beyond the easy answers, and to ask the hard questions of the institutions and people within them that are the power base.

Sport is one of the pillars of global society, as it has been since the days of the Greeks. To many, how the home team is doing comes before elections and world strife.  The organizations that deliver your fix of sports are incredibly powerful, and  exceptionally media savvy. They put out information designed to manipulate your consumption of their product.

With the advent of ESPN, the notion of a fourth-estate for sports has disappeared in a series of highlights reels and endless chatter about who has landed on the police blotter with this drug arrest or that crime. While Fox milks entertainment value out of the trials and tribulations of a Kobe or LeBron, the bigger stories get left untold, or unfinished.

After the show of the names that made the Mitchell list, baseball writers have moved on.  Quality guys like Willie Randolph get tossed, and guys like Paul LoDuca, who knowingly cheated the game by allegedly taking performance enhancing substances, comment from their positions as major leaguers.

Tim Russert inspired me to think beyond covering the moment in sports, to look at the bigger picture, and ask some hard questions about what is really going on behind the scenes to manipulate the public's perception of the games that we watch.

Just as he had a moral obligation to keep the political system honest and working on behalf of the people who it is supposed to support, I work for you, the sports fan, to try and keep it real.

The internet is the birthplace of the new fourth estate.  Indepedent companies that provide great news 24/7 to readers across the globe who do not need the big dollars of the major media conglomerates to have a place on the stage.  Bloggers who are not professionals but who are passionate about something and can articulate their passion well enough to add to the conversation about a subject.

Russert may have been the last of the great TV journalists still actively working the networks, but great journalism is still alive and well on the Internet.  We will miss his astute political coverage, his balance, and his passion. His legacy though, is a legion of journalists who admired his method and his style, and will keep the good fight alive for years to come. 

Comments

[morenagame]

brian - do you have an email address that will accept file attachments? would like to send some important documents your way