Russert Watch

Curious about the utter lack of basic journalistic balance in the Times' story on Tim Russert, I phoned Todd Purdum and asked him about the lack of opposing viewpoints in his piece. (After all, even an article about Mother Teresa would include some mention of her critics.) "I don't feel like I'm the person you should ask," Purdum said. "You should ask those questions of my editors." Then he added: "Hindsight is always 20/20 and if I were doing that piece again, maybe I'd do things differently." Hindsight? But, Todd, you wrote the piece Sunday. Did something happen since then to bring you fresh insight?

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked: "If the president does try to recover, does try to reach out, will the Democrats join with him or will they resist him?" So there you have it. If those damn Democrats stop resisting the president, we can all look forward to a big-idea, booming, bipartisan second term. Except, that is, for all those pesky people who don't like being lied to about the war, and don't like senior administration officials perjuring themselves to cover up their lies.

When I asked my HuffPost partner Kenny Lerer what he thought of Sunday’s Meet the Press, he told me he started watching it, but then quickly switched to Pet Keeping with Marc Morrone. In fact, he said he's decided to start competing with Russert Watch by blogging every Sunday about Pet Keeping, so stay tuned for that. The funny thing is, you're as likely to learn the nature of Tim's involvement in the Plame affair from Pet Keeping as from Tim's own show.

So now that Judy Miller and the New York Times have spoken (however incompletely), what about Tim Russert and NBC? After all, he too was a participant in Plamegate, was interviewed under oath by Fitzgerald, and, as a journalist, has a responsibility to explain to the public just exactly what he knows. Instead, he prefers trotting out the obligatory question that has become as much of a “Tim thing” as those bow ties are a “Tucker Carlson thing”: "Are you going to run for president in 2008?" Sunday it was Condi Rice's turn...

At MTP on Sunday, we were treated to Trent Lott desperately jumping through hoops in his reason-defying war-defending song and dance. To be fair, other than actually having to execute this war -- with too few troops, too little international help, and zero justification -- the hardest job in the world right now is being sent out to defend it.

Now, I don’t mean to gnaw on a bone (actually, I do mean to gnaw on a bone -- isn’t that what blogging is all about?) but I still think Russert owes it to his viewers to finally come clean about his still-unexplained involvement in Plamegate. Or, if not, then at least yell “bullshit!” on the air, get himself suspended, and go into hiding.

Here is how guest host Andrea Mitchell brought up Cindy Sheehan in her interview of Joe Biden: "There is a mother of a soldier who died in Iraq who is protesting down in Crawford and has now been joined by organized anti-war protesters. Do you agree with Cindy Sheehan? Should we withdraw immediately?" Can you imagine another way of formulating the obligatory question about Sheehan that would more easily have allowed Andrea -- and Biden -- to distance themselves from the grieving mother who wants to meet with the man who sent her son to die in Iraq? Biden, who is running for president, loved, of course, the opportunity to talk about troop withdrawal rather than a mother's standoff with the president. He ended his answer as far away from Crawford as possible: "When we were in the Balkans, we, in fact, dealt with the Croats as well as the Serbs according to the Dayton accords..." Dayton? The Balkans? You can almost feel the two of them breathe a sigh of relief, having successfully tiptoed across the minefield of an actual story. After Andrea made sure Cindy knew her place in the Meet the Press world, she moved on to John Roberts, calling a request for public documents from the White House a "fishing expedition." A fishing expedition?

It’s great to be home -- for all kinds of reasons: sleeping in my own bed, eating home cooked food, catching up with friends face-to-face instead o...

For the last few weeks, I've pointed out how...demure Tim Russert has been in acknowledging his own role in the Plame/Novak/Rove story. It happened again this Sunday in a completely different context. The topic was the role of religion in the nomination of John Roberts. Russert mentioned, just after introducing guest Mario Cuomo, that he had worked for Cuomo twenty years ago. Good disclosure. But since the subject at hand was one's Catholic faith, and how it affected one's professional temperament, might it have been appropriate for Russert also to mention that he shared the nominee's faith? Sure, it's a tricky business, but co-religion might have a greater impact on his willingness to pose tough, impolite queries than a two-decade-old work relationship with one of the guests. Misdirection, thy name is MTP.

Time for another Russert Watch preview. This week’s show features Mario Cuomo and law professor Douglas Kmiec discussing the role Judge John Roberts’ Catholicism should play in his confirmation. But, frankly, this week, instead of coming up with questions for Tim, I’d like to hear him give some long-overdue answers about his still ill-defined involvement in Plamegate. And I’m not the only one feeling this way. Earlier this week, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg called on Russert and all the other reporters involved in the story (yes, that includes you Bob Novak) to “tell us everything”: “Tim Russert cuts a large figure in Washington,” wrote Schanberg. “He should be a big man now and give us some details; why not agree to be interviewed by someone as probing as he?” Leaving aside the question of just how probing Russert actually is, I think Schanberg has hit on a fantastic idea. Indeed, why doesn’t Tim agree to be interviewed on his own show? He can bring on one guest interviewer (What are you doing on Sunday, Sydney?) or a panel of them. So what do you say, Tim? Why not put Roberts’ faith on hold for a week and restore the public’s faith in you by putting yourself in the Meet the Press hot seat…

So we learned late Friday that John Bolton had, to be charitable, forgotten that he had been interviewed by the State Department's IG in a 2003 State-CIA investigation of the Iraq-Niger uranium story. He had filled out a questionnaire saying he had not, in the previous five years, testified before a grand jury or been interviewed as part of an investigation. You know how you forget those visits from the Inspector General of your own department? So here's Tim's kickoff question on Bolton to conservative political panel member Kate O'Beirne: “Word is that tomorrow the president will make a recess appointment. What do you hear?” Way to set the table. The children's table.

Finally, the roundtable, and finally, the words I've been waiting for--Russert admits he's part of the Plame story: "What we know so far is that in terms of journalists, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, Russert of NBC, Matt Cooper of Time magazine have all testified, either in deposition or before the grand jury. We assume Robert Novak has testified because Judy Miller of The Times who didn't testify is in jail. And there's been numerous newspaper reports that there's a difference between the testimony of some of the reporters and Scooter Libby of Vice President Cheney's office and Karl Rove of President Bush's office. Bill Safire, what do we make of all this?" What Safire makes of all this is that Judy Miller, who helped promulgate the same questionable intel that Safire was peddling in his Atta-in-Prague columns, shouldn't be in jail. What I made of it was that Russert referred to himself in the third person, as if he were suddenly channeling Bob Dole. Harry Shearer likes that…

Since I’m still away, this weekend’s Russert Watch will once again be in the masterful hands of Harry Shearer, who really nailed it last week when he pointed out the despicable yet delicious way that Russert, in interviewing Matt Cooper, completely failed to mention the fact that he too had testified in front of the grand jury investigating the Plame leak. Gee, it seems like the kind of thing a journalist might want to tell his audience -- especially given the fact that there is no grand jury rule compelling witnesses to stay mum about their testimony. Hell, he didn’t even whip out the old “In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out…” Russert’s guests this week include Fred Thompson, Sen. Dick “Don’t Cry for Me Gitmo” Durbin, and a panel of Beltway journalists who will discuss, among other things, the Rove scandal. Wonder if Tim will get them to play that hot new DC parlor game: “Guess What I Told the Grand Jury!” Here are a few of the questions I’d like to hear Tim ask…

Arianna has asked me to take the reins of the Russert Watch for a couple of weeks. This week's broadcast had two huge elephants in the studio that went unnoticed for the full hour. First: Like his guest Matt Cooper, Russert had testified to the grand jury on the Plame affair, yet at no point during the interview did the salient fact sally forth to the viewer. The pretense was uninvolved journalist interviewing involved participant: the reality was one pea in the pod interviewing a fellow pea. Cooper almost made news, but Russert saved him. RUSSERT: "…there may have been more sources [than Rove and Libby]?" COOPER: "Yes." And there that line of questioning ends... whatever desire Tim has to get into it vanishes in the morning mist.

Another week, another Russert Watch… but this Sunday’s installment will have a twist. Since I’m traveling in Europe and won’t be able to partake of my ritual of doing yoga while watching Meet the Press, I’ve handed the Russert Watch controls over to my great pal Harry Shearer, the HuffPost’s resident media watchdog (I’ve also offered him the services of my yoga teacher, but I’m not sure if he’s going to take me up on that one). There should be plenty for Harry to sink his “Eat the Press” knife and fork into this week, as Russert will be devoting his show to what the MTP website calls “The CIA Leak” (interesting choice of words; I would think “The White House Leak” or “Karl Rove Can’t Keep A Secret” might be more appropriate). Russert’s guests include Matt Cooper, fresh off his grand jury testimony, RNC chair Ken Mehlman, and, in what the MTP promo people are marketing as the Beltway equivalent of a Beatles reunion, “Woodward and Bernstein together again.” Here are a few of the questions I’d like to hear Russert ask his guests:

Coming in the wake of the London bombings, today’s Meet the Press was a lot about resource allocation. Specifically, given the resources at our disposal, are we using them in the best way so as to maximize our safety? The answer is clearly no. And part of the reason this looks unlikely to change is because of the resource allocation decisions of shows like Meet the Press. Tim’s first guest today was Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Good guest to have on if you want to talk seriously about, say, our homeland security. But that’s not what Tim wanted. Instead, he decided to allocate a lot of his scarce 60 minutes' worth of resources to parlor game questions. The one he most favored today was: Do you think there will be another major attack on the United States? He asked it three times. And, of course, everybody basically said yes. But what’s the point of this question? Is anybody going to say no? Later, Chertoff, in discussing homeland security funding, said “everything's a tradeoff. We don't want to move money, for example, from ports into rail because then we're going to have an issue with ports.” Yes, exactly! It’s a tradeoff. One of the reasons we don’t have enough money to protect our ports and our railways is because of the tens of billions of dollars we are spending in Iraq. And that’s the massive trade-off Russert failed to bring up.

A bold prediction: Tim Russert will do a much, much better job on this Sunday's show than he did last week. How can I be so sure? Well, Tim didn't ...

It’s Saturday, and faithful Russertwatchers know that means more questions for Russert before tomorrow’s Meet The Press. Before we get to your q...

It’s a jam-packed show this week as Tim is joined by Arlen Spector and Pat Leahy to discuss the implications of the O'Connor retirement, and Chris Dodd, Chuck Hagel and Duncan Hunter to talk about Iraq -- because, as the Meet the Press website puts it, "the war in Iraq still dominates the hearts and minds of the American public". Hey, thanks for noticing… Here are two of the questions I'd like to hear Russert ask his guests: "Sen. Hagel, at the end of last month, you said, 'The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along.' Since then, Don Rumsfeld has defended the progress of the war in front of the Senate and the President has tried to convince the nation that the war in Iraq is connected to what happened on 9/11. What is it going to take before this administration starts leveling with the American people?" "Rep. Hunter, you've been a very vocal defender of the treatment prisoners in Guatanamo Bay receive, arguing that their menu includes items such as oven-fried chicken, rice pilaf, and pita bread, and that 'the average inmate in Guantanamo has gained five to seven pounds last year.' My question: Isn't it possible to feed a man rice pilaf and still subject him to torture?”

This is how Tim Russert opened Meet the Press today: Our issues this Sunday: the war in Iraq, growing concerns among the public, which are being echo...

Once again, our faithful Russertwatchers have spoken, providing a stockpile of hard-hitting questions for EZ Pass Tim during tomorrow's Rumsfeld inter...

Okay, Russert Watch fans, this is the one we've been waiting for. The Big Kahuna. The Super Bowl of Meet the Press shows. The chance to see what our favorite newsman is really made of. That's right, Tim's guest this week is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, fresh off his rocky appearance in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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As is our wont, we asked yesterday for questions you’d like to hear Tim Russert ask Sen. John McCain on tomorrow's Meet the Press. We've gotten gre...

After a lethargic and seemingly "morning after" performance last week, our portly interlocutor looks ready to bounce back. Or at least the webmaster ...