Far be it for me to minimize the shock and suffering of the Russert family but aren’t the cable and broadcast TV stations going too far with their hours long eulogizing of Tim Russert?
Apparently
no other news of interest is occurring anywhere in the US or the world.
RIP Tim Russert, a brief tribute to his life’s work in order, and move
on to covering other happenings such as the flooding in Iowa, or the impact of the Habeas Corpus decision by the US
Supreme court, or the Irish rejection of the EU treaty, or the fuel
tankers strike spreading across the world from Spain to UK to South
Korea.
Instead we get teary eyed non-stop tributes from Keith
Olbermann, Pat Buchanan, Wolf Blitzer, Barbara Walters, Peggy Noonan,
Andrea Mitchell that have been going on for a full 4 hours. We get it-
it was a shocking and unexpected demise. But does it warrant the sort
of all-exclusive coverage of this kind?
It takes me back to the
constant focus on Indira Gandhi as she lay in state in 1984 after her
untimely death by assassination. All the TV showed was the endless line
of people filing by, interspersed with fixed slides backed with
mournful sitar twangs, followed by endless scenes of the grieving
family at the funeral pyre. The only exception was that some head
honcho at Doordarshan, the state-run TV channel, decided that
broadcasting the 1945 B&W version of ‘Meera’, with M.S. Subbulakshmi
in the singing and acting lead, was appropriate telecasting in such a
mournful time – a breath of fresh air for me).
So now, it’s
all Russert all the time, to the point of wishing that we had also
departed with him in order to avoid this deathly dull programming.
There have been clippings of Russert at balls, at conferences, at
meetings, at diners, on his Meet the Press interviewing the celebrities
and politicos du jour, with the Pope, everything but Russert tying his
shoelaces at his son’s baseball practice.
Mercifully, this ought to
end by tonight. Tomorrow we will be back to the usual program and doses
of Brangelina, Baby Mama, how-to-improve-gas-mileage,
how-to-go-green-by-buying-new-appliances, salmonella tomatoes, floods
in the Midwest, the capture for the zillionth time of Al Qaeda’s no. 2
Man in Iraq/Afghanistan…
———————
Note: Cross-posted from Fluff-n-Stuff.
Accidental Blogger 
7 responses to “An Overdose of Grief (Sujatha)”
Very well said :) R was in deep mourning for Tim, (and I liked Tim a lot too), but after watching an hour of the Tim Russert Eulogy Show (or should I say competition), I was very glad we were supposed to visit a friend today :)
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Thanks Lekhni, I’m glad that I’m not alone in feeling that way.
I think a brief comment on the ephemerality of life and a moment of silence in Russert’s memory would have worked far better than the swimming pools of platitudes and eulogies that the newscasters dumped on their viewers. Or, they should have given the whole crowd the night off to deal with their personal misery and gone to re-runs or newsfeed from say, BBC or CNN-IBN or even CSPAN.
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For me, the most painful moment of public “grieving” followed Reagan’s death. They hauled his body all over the country, set his casket on display in the capitol…then hauled it back to the other side of the country…then had the funeral. It was a full week of theatrical, maudlin nonsense. Fox News treated it like The Most Significant Event Ever. It went on and on, with every journalist using their phony “sad” voice and their well-rehearsed “serious” face. They can turn those things off and on like a switch. Anyway. That was some overbearing nonsense.
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Sujatha, I was also struck by the comparison with Doordarshan. It’s true, DD used to play sitar music and stop all programs not only for major Indian leaders, but even for Iranian heads of state and anyone they thought fit. It was a big relief when the private channels arrived, and continued their regular programming while DD droned.
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The cable news outlets were the real culprits. MSNBC and CNN spoke of nothing else since 3:30 pm onwards yesterday. Every journalist recalled every significant or insignificant contact that he or she had with Tim Russert during his life time. I mean, how many iterations are enough for us to learn and believe that Russert came from a working class background, was a great interviewer, loved his family and his faith was deep? It is a bit unseemly (maudlin, as Matt says) to just go on and on about the passing of a public figure (in this case, a journalist) as if it is a personal tragedy for all of us. The news media ought to realize that the minutiae of the off-camera camaraderie among Washington insiders is not something a lot of us are dying to know. With their interminable hours on the screen, these newsmen have forgotten that they are there to “report” the news and not “become” news.
ABC Evening News did open with Russert’s death but then went on to cover other news, including the flooding in Iowa. The McLaughling Group on PBS had one sentence of condolence to the Russert family at the end of the half hour program. So the breathless hagiography was left to CNN and MSNBC mostly.
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I should add that perhaps the news media also went overboard because Russert was relative young and he died suddenly and unexpectedly at his work place.
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I think it’s just the journalism connection that caused this unleashing of personal grief from the media. Compare the coverage of Russert with that of Heath Ledger- also an unexpected unfortunate accident, but while the media turned a prurient eye on that, they didn’t do it 24/7 with personal outpourings/near canonization as they have done with Russert.
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