Posted on 06/15/2008 2:33:41 PM PDT by wm_tate
there was another chapter in Mr. Russert’s career that is less known, and that offers another insight into his personality. And it is one which he arguably thrived at nearly as much as he did sitting behind his desk at NBC News: as a political strategist and operative in one of the most brutal political environments in the country.
Mr. Russert worked in the early 1980s as a counselor to Mario M. Cuomo, the Queens Democrat who had just been elected governor of New York; I was covering the new administration for The Daily News. Albany was a political roughhouse, and all the more so with a hard-driving new administration with big goals for Mr. Cuomo....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The NYT has inadvertently let slip the concerns that we in the public have when Big media hires Democrat operatives--Mr. Russert, Stephanopoulous, et el--to work as "journalists."
I wouldn't have brought this up given the tragedy of Mr. Russert's all-too-early passing, but the Times article today made it fair game.
-Wm Tate, A Time Like This
The non-stop lovefest IS getting tiresome...
http://exposingtheleft.blogspot.com/2008/06/russert-dead-at-58.html
I had to turn FNC off, Geraldo “The Fake”, was giving his view of Russert.
I laff evry time i see gerry rivers. All i see is Capone`s empty “vault” and stupid gerry standing there.
Apart from that Russert was a biased “reporter” who`s propaganda was sublte yet unmistakable. That`s why hee`l be sorely missed by so many on the left.
IMO big mouth Jerry Rivers is a DA clown...as is moet of the TeeVee pronostigators!
On another thread, some where railed against for these very comments.
Thanks for bringing this up. Many posters in the past would slam Russert with ruthless attacks.
Now those same posters are acting as if he is a revered friend...posers all
Geraldo was intolerable.
Everyone forgets for just whom Russert worked.Some of the biggest lefties there ever were.
The way the “newreaders” of the MSM are going on (and on, and on, and on) I expect it won’t be long before they propose immediate sainthood for Mr. Russert (may God rest his soul).
I turn off geraldo whenever he shows his ugly face.
He "acclimated" to it? Geez, they bring climate into everything. How about he got used to it.
You think it's tiresome? You ought to live in Buffalo. All news has stopped save the paeans to Tim.
If NBC puts Keith Olberfuhrerman in his place it will make even CBS’s decision to anchor Perky Katie Couric seem brilliant...Meet The Press ratings will fall faster than a Democratic politician’s pledge to cut taxes.
The NYT has inadvertently let slip the concerns that we in the public have when Big media hires Democrat operatives--Mr. Russert, Stephanopoulous, et el--to work as "journalists."
In reality "journalism" as we know it scarcely existed in the founding era. They had "newspapers" back then, of course. But the printers thereof didn't have the Associated Press newswire back then. And without "the wire," printers obtained information the old fashioned way - by talking to people and reading things. So that in principle, any given private citizen in the printer's local area might know any given fact that the printer might print in his paper before that edition of the paper came out. Consequently "newspapers" had a different character in the founding era than that which the AP newswire began to enable and produce in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. That is, they were more like modern political commentary publications than like today's journalism. Commonly they were not daily publications, and they all wore their editors' perspectives on their sleeves. Famously, two of them were sponsored by Hamilton and Jefferson, who used them as tools in their political battles with each other.The advent and spread of the AP, started as the New York Associated Press in 1848, raised the issue of a monopoly of public influence. The AP countered those charges by assuring everyone that since its member newspapers had wildly contradictory editorial policies, the AP was objective. Conceivably the AP might even have believed it - but it is, was, and always will be false. First because being convinced of your own objectivity is the best definition I can think of for subjectivity. And second, because of the aforementioned transformation of the newspaper business which the AP itself caused. The Associated Press, and every AP member newspaper individually, was in the business of selling highly perishable news. The only difference between the information on the newswire and information about the same events carried by physical rather than electrical means was - time. Time was the enemy of the journalist, because people would eventually learn from other sources whatever the journalist knew - and the journalist wanted to attract your attention and impress you by being the one who told you things first.
In short, the ineluctable characteristic of journalism is superficiality. At any given time the journalist is promoting a new story that you haven't heard yet, just as if every day's happenings were - at least on that day - as significant as the bombing of Pearl Harbor. If yesterday the news of the day was as important as Pearl Harbor, and today the news of today is sold as more important than the "yesterday's news," the existence of a perpetually accelerating crisis is the planted axiom of "the news."
If there is an accelerating crisis afoot, you had better do two things. First, you had better keep up with the news. And second, you had better see that the government agrees that there is a crisis as the first step toward responding to the crisis. How are you to know which politicians agree that there is a crisis? Well of course objective journalism cannot be partisan, but just between you and me (wink) journalists label politicians who agree with journalists positively, and those who do not, negatively. Everyone is in favor of liberty, so journalists label politicians who agree with journalists "liberals." And if there is a crisis, "desperate ills are by desperate measures cured. Or not at all." So if there is a crisis, the very last person that you want running things is someone who is most concerned about taking unnecessary and possibly dangerous action - a "conservative."
And that is why the only difference between an "objective journalist" and a "liberal" is in his job title. Any "liberal" can get a job as a journalist and instantly be accepted by all other journalists as "objective." But no conservative can do so.
BTTT
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