I was out working on my sailboat when I heard the news that Tim Russert had died. The local NPR station had just switched from it's classical music format to the nightly broadcast of All Things Considered. The headlines started with "one of Washington's most respected journalists had died". I thought immediately it must have been Helen Thomas the longtime elder icon of the Washington press corp. I was shocked that they started they mentioned Tim Russert.
What made Russert different from many of the other journalists in the mainstream media is his middle class background. There are far to few journalists today who have the sensitivity and common sense of the middle class. Tim because of his growing up in Buffalo the son of a hard working middle class sanitation truck driver understood what it meant to be middle class in America and never forgot it. He was more in tune with that segment of the American public than many of the others in the mainstream media. There are not many others in the media with the same sensibility. With Russert gone politics will not be the same, America will not be the same.
What made Russert different from many of the other journalists in the mainstream media is his middle class background. There are far to few journalists today who have the sensitivity and common sense of the middle class. Tim because of his growing up in Buffalo the son of a hard working middle class sanitation truck driver understood what it meant to be middle class in America and never forgot it. He was more in tune with that segment of the American public than many of the others in the mainstream media. There are not many others in the media with the same sensibility. With Russert gone politics will not be the same, America will not be the same.
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