From Keith Olbermann comes a perspective on Tim Russert which really alters my perception of him

Keith O, from the Rolling Stone interview

"I don't know that there's going to be anything hugely different that's visible to the viewer. It's not going to be like, 'I'm going to do the last half of the show topless.' But the freedom from the wear and tear of having to get past a bunch of people mumbling, 'Oh, I don't know . . .' It's the key to the operation, it really is."

-- Keith Olbermann, in Rolling Stone,
on the new Current TV incarnation of Countdown

by Ken

I don't mean to become a shill for Keith Olbermann, although I suppose there are worse things a person could become a shill for. But I really was surprised by how satisfying the Thurber celebration he ringmastered from his wheelchair (for his broken foot) Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y was. His own reading, with projections of the drawings, of the whole of the "parable in pictures" The Last Flower, one of the supremely great books ever to find its way into print, left me kind of shivery. (It was, by the way, E. B. White -- I couldn't remember whether it was White or Thurber -- who pronounced this his favorite Thurber book.)

ONE THING I MEANT TO MENTION SUNDAY . . .

Rosie and Keith backstage at the 92nd Street Y Sunday

The Last Flower also has one of the all-time great book dedications. Published as World War II was breaking out, it was dedicated: "For Rosemary. In the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine." What I didn't know is that the latest edition of The Last Flower, from the University of Iowa Press, was designed by Rosie's daughter, Thurber's granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. Both she and her mother signed copies afterward.

Rosie, by the way, among other contributions, read the great fable "The Little Girl and the Wolf" (which we read here), which she recalled first reading at about the same time she found out that Thurber was her father, when she was eight, and was delighted to find that it was her father who had written the moral, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be," and understood this about what little girls understood.

I do want to make sure everyone knows that the new Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuts on Current TV this coming Monday at 8pm. How many people will be able to watch is another question, and one that Keith is clearly agonizing over. In the question period of the Thurber program, an audience member expressed the hope that he would soon be able to see Current TV on Cablevision, and Keith wished him luck. Evidently there have been discussions with "Mr. Dolan" and his people which haven't been terribly fruitful.

NOW, ABOUT KEITH O AND TIM RUSSERT (AND
ALSO, NOT TO HIS CREDIT, TOM BROKAW)

Anyway, none of this is why I brought Keith up again. It's because of some things he says which I found fascinating in a recent interview with Mark Binelli in the June 23 Rolling Stone. If you haven't read the interview, you really should -- and also the selection of "outtakes" from the interview published online. 

Here's the thread that particularly got my attention:

When did things start to change for you at MSNBC?

It was three years ago, when Tim Russert died. One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me. He never made a big deal out of the fact that he probably was my biggest supporter within the network. He used to go to them and say, "Leave him alone, we can handle the blowback, I'll take care of it." After he died, Maureen, his wife, told me that she used to have to wrest the channel-changer away from him every night, because he loved to watch the show. She said, "You deal with this all day and you have to watch it again?" He said, "I have to see what he's saying about it, it's the best." I teared up and said, "I didn't know that." She said, "He thought you already had a big enough head."

Mark asks Keith about Tom Brokaw's public criticism of him "for 'going too far' in injecting commentary into your campaign coverage," and apparently before he gets Brokaw's name out, at the words "during the 2008 election," Keith is fetching a piece of paper from his wallet.

Let me read this to you. You can see how old it is -- it already came apart. March 5, 2008, Wednesday morning, 9:45 a.m. "Keith, game ball goes to you for last night. I've been at this for 40 years and have a full appreciation for how tricky it is to go from commentator to anchor, get the news out, manage the many egos, make sure lots of different points of view are represented, maintain your own place in the proceedings, you did it all splendidly." You can see the name of who sent that [Tom Brokaw].

So there you have it. I've never shared that with anybody before. Now you have a private comment that he didn't seem to remember when he made his public comment five months later.

Originally, Keith says, he carried this note around because --

it was confirmation from somebody I had great respect for. What he said there was that you can be a commentator and an anchor, you can get your points across and yet be neutral when you're supposed to be neutral. From one of the best in the business, it meant a great deal to me. Then what it meant to me is, "Wow, things change fast after people like Russert die."

I have to say, what Keith has to say about Tim Russert really does change my view of the guy. Not of his performance on the air, which still seems to me to have been cowardly and self-serving, but of what we learn here about his impact behind the scenes, where he really does seem to have extended himself to make it possible for NBC News people to be, well, less cowardly and self-serving than the pressures of the business would otherwise have permitted.

Is it possible that this effort was so heroic as to confuse him into thinking he was being heroic on the air? Because my very strong image of Russert as a journalist is that he was the consummate, perhaps even ultimate, Village Insider, using those considerable smarts and that quick verbal agility to enforce the conventional wisdom of the status quo. In fact, the very fact that he came to Big Media from the political world (first as chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later as counsel to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo) seems to have helped cement the alliance of Beltway politics and media.

I don't suppose Russert was necessarily beloved of the pols who trooped onto Meet the Press and ran into his "gotcha" buzzsaw. But I think even the stumblingest victims understood that he was on their side, that they were in it together -- and unfortunately they were in it together largely against us, the unwashed and unserious masses. That he was as good at what he did as he was made it on the whole worse.

Nothing Keith says here changes my opinion about any of that. But that there was more to what Tim Russert was and did, that someone like Keith thought of him as both an inspiration and a protector -- well, this really adds a dimension to my image of him.

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First read the NYT scribe, sticking a sharp pin in that infernal gasbag Chris Matthews. Then read Digby's take to appreciate the full horror of it all

"Matthews may be the most ridiculously transparent of the Village idiots and scribes, but he is far from unique. The story isn't him, it's the sick culture that has nurtured him and allows people like him to flourish."
--Digby, in "Tears of a Clown," a commentary on the upcoming NYTMag profile of Chris Matthews (see below)

In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, NYT reporter Mark Leibovich has a profile of MSNBC's Chris Matthews which stretches to (by my rough count) approximately 12 zillion words. It's already circulating online, and occasioning much comment. To my astonishment I read the whole damned thing straight through to the end, by which time it's hard not to think that the subject barely merited a 500-word thumbnail sketch.

For once it's not one of your usual NYTMag puff pieces. No indeed. While it's hardly a savage attack piece, the thing is, how do you write at length (and in, God help us, depth, or at least breadth) about our Chris without driving home the point, ad infinitum, that there's no there there? If you were to look up the word nonentity in the dictionary, you know whose picture you would expect to find there.

And yet the guy is a "player" in our rough-and-stumble game of politics. Which I guess is what the fascination is about. You wonder, are you missing something here? Does anyone take him seriously? (Well, he gets paid $5 million a year, so somebody must.) And the reality, as set forth in Leibovich's earnest and not overtly hostile account, is horribly depressing.

I'm not going to retrace the ground Leibovich covers. But I do have some favorite moments. Like this observation from someone who served in the Peace Corps with our Chris, who joined in 1968, the year after he graduated from college.

The following year, he was posted in Swaziland, in southeast Africa, where he taught business skills to villagers and rode around on a little Suzuki motorcycle. “He often wore a necktie,” recalls Fred O’Regan, a fellow volunteer.

“I remember we were out hitchhiking once,” O’Regan told me. Matthews started arguing about Nixon and Vietnam. “It was just like watching his show today. Chris would ask a question, then he would answer it himself and then the person was invited to comment on Chris’s answer to his own question.”

Our Chris exhibits a near-pathological obsession with himself. Poor Leibovich, in the course of his time with the great man, was treated to endless repetitions of the same cheesy self-promotional spiels. At the same time, the guy seems to have a truly cosmic lack of real-world self-awareness.

As I began researching this article, Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC spokesman, gave me the names of about a dozen people that Matthews recommended I speak to, all famous--everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Marvin Hamlisch. But gatekeepers for more than one of these people expressed confusion as to why Matthews would refer me to them. “Please keep us out of this,” pleaded a spokesperson for one prominent politician whom Matthews had recommended via Gaines.

The other night I happened to be at a gathering of lots of serious progressive folk, and an unwatched TV was on, with the sound turned all the way down in the empty den. It was tuned to MSNBC, and with 8:00 (and Countdown) approaching, I was trying to figure out how to activate the closed captions. When another guest passed through and noticed Chris hardballing on-screen, I explained what I was trying to do, and he seemed relieved. "I don't like Chris Matthews," he said, and I pointed out that he's really much better when you can't hear him. But still not entirely bearable, as Leibovich points out:

It can be amusing if slightly painful to watch Matthews’s facial expressions and body language on the set of “Hardball” when others are talking; he will, at times, bounce in his seat like a Ritalin-deprived second-grader who is dying to give an answer but has been admonished too many times for interrupting. He appears to go through the same pained exercise in his own home. Indeed, as I learned at Sunday brunch there, the degree to which the cadences of the Matthews dining room mimic “Hardball” is striking.

One of Leibovich's recurring themes is that Matthews' contract expires in May, and there's serious question as to how serious NBC is about re-signing him, especially at his current pay level. (Can you believe he's actually paid $5 million a year? Read it for yourself. Hey, I'm not making this stuff up.)

“I have a lot of options,” Matthews told me. “I’m a free man starting next June.” There has been long-running speculation that Matthews could be a candidate to replace Bob Schieffer, whenever he retires, as the host of CBS’s Sunday morning show “Face the Nation.”

Now wait just a blamed second. "Long-running speculation that Matthews could be a candidate to replace Bob Schieffer"??? What??? You mean, speculation by people besides Chris Matthews? Okay, here is Bob Schieffer, and here is Chris Matthews. Is the theory that CBS will jump at the opportunity to put someone way dumber than the singularly classy (for his profession) Bob Schieffer in the Face the Nation chair?

Now, to Digby's take on the NYT piece:

I don't know if it's an accurate portrayal of Matthews or not but if it is he is even more of a cartoon character in real life than he is on his show. He fulfills every single Village media cliche: obsessive social climbing, deep personal insecurity, primitively sexist and racist and just plain dumb. It's so bad that I almost felt sorry for him by the end of it. In fact, it's so relentlessly damning it feels like piling on -- and nobody hates this guy more than I do.

What really cracks me up in the article is the extent to which people who are just as bad as he is in their own ways try to distance themselves from him.

Special scorn is deservedly reserved for Tim Russert, who--

is made to look positively statesmanlike in contrast to crazy Chris, for the single most shameful episode in his career: the Scooter Libby business. Please, if there is one time in his whole damned career that Matthews accidentally did some journalism it was when he intuited that Libby and Cheney were in the middle of the Plame scandal. Russert folded like a fading begonia when Scooter called him to give him what for and he was forced to admit under oath that he automatically puts all conversations with important people on background without them even asking. That's how he builds 'trust." With them. Not us.

In the end (and to return to where we started), depressing as it is to discover that our Chris may be an even emptier shell than we could have imagined, the big-picture reality--which Leibovich either doesn't see or doesn't wish to look into, for whatever reason(s)--is way more depressing. Listen again:

Matthews may be the most ridiculously transparent of the Village idiots and scribes, but he is far from unique. The story isn't him, it's the sick culture that has nurtured him and allows people like him to flourish.

Could it be said any better?

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