(HOST) Did the news media go over the top in devoting far too much time to the death of NBC’s Tim Russert? This morning, commentator Barrie Dunsmore, who spent more than thirty years as a correspondent for ABC News, has some thoughts on the coverage.
(DUNSMORE) I have to admit that at one point about a week after Tim Russert’s sudden fatal heart attack, even I began to wonder if the news media weren’t overdoing it. I knew Russert professionally, respected his work, and was saddened by his death. But he wasn’t a President or a pope – yet that is the kind of wall to wall coverage his death received – and not only on NBC and its cable channel. All the other networks also devoted a great deal of attention to his passing, as did major newspapers and magazines.
But even when considering that he was a prominent television personality – and a highly respected journalist with an everyman image – and his death, unlike Peter Jennings’, was totally unexpected, I still don’t think that quite explains what I’m sure some people thought was media overindulgence.
I would suggest that Russert was mourned so deeply because his death really does mark the end of the era when substantive, credible reporting was the norm in commercial broadcast news. That era began on radio with Edward R. Murrow during World War II. Its golden age was the sixties, seventies and early eighties, when every evening some fifty million Americans watched the television news on one of the then three networks. Things have been in decline since that audience became fragmented, first by cable, then satellite and the Internet – but more significantly by the fact that the network news divisions went from being loss leaders to cash cows.
It may seem a contradiction to suggest that the problems of the news business were created by too much money. But take a look. In the beginning, network news was seen as a public service and was not profitable. But when the networks started making a lot of money in news, that’s when they became corporate takeover targets. And, in each case, the new ownership was not interested in the quality of its news, only in the ratings – because, of course, higher ratings meant even greater profit.
Likewise, when newspapers started having double digit profits they became attractive to Wall Street investors. But that came to mean the value of a newspaper’s stock dictates how much news can be covered and how many journalists it can afford to keep. And as those once high profits of the old, mainstream media were not sustainable, newsrooms everywhere are being down-sized. Just what form the news business will eventually take is still unfolding. The growing number of opinionated loudmouths on cable television is not a good omen.
As to how this relates to the Russert coverage, Howard Kurtz, of the Washington Post summed it up: "The emotional farewells to Russert, which ultimately came to feel excessive, seemed rooted in journalism’s crisis of confidence. Russert was a popular figure in a field whose practitioners are often mocked and derided. Journalists of all stripes wanted to be associated with him, perhaps hoping a little of the magic dust would rub off."