If it’s Sunday . . . it’s “Meet the Press” with Tim Russert.
Starting when they were very young, I began to teach my three children this phrase. (Sure, it doesn’t have the clever ring of your standard nursery rhyme, but this is what happens when your mom’s a journalism professor, writer and all around politics and news junkie.)
I’d enthusiastically point to the TV – featuring the mug of the man who had a thousand, detailed and well researched questions ready to pose to politicians and policy makers – and tell my kids that NBC’s Tim Russert was a really smart guy whose words about politics they should heed.
After years and years of my repeating the, “If it’s Sunday” line, it finally stuck. “Hey guys,” I’d say in an annoying, sing-song voice on a Sunday morning as I flipped on the TV, “’If it’s Sunday . . .” Then I’d wait, silently, expectantly, for the kids to fill in the rest.
“(*Audible groans, silent shaking of heads*) It’s ‘Meet the Press’ with Tim Russert,” they’d finally grumble in a monotone. They knew if they didn’t respond, I’d just keep asking until they did.
When my father, a fellow news junkie, called to tell me that Russert had died on Friday afternoon, I was heart broken. Russert, the host of the gold standard in Sunday political talk shows, was a role model, an Edward R. Murrow to my generation of journalists. I sat on my sofa, transfixed by the cable TV coverage and thought about what had been lost in that afternoon.
As my children wandered through the room at different times and told me they were sorry that Russert had died, I thought about what his abrupt absence from the world of political journalism would mean.
Without Russert on the air on Sunday mornings, future and upcoming journalists have been robbed of the lessons they could’ve learned from him. While teaching journalism students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst , I had used Russert -- who had worked for Democratic politicians in his pre-journalism life -- as an example of how one can be a fair, exquisitely prepared and smart interviewer. “Watch him interview someone and try to discern if he has a bias,” I’d challenge them. Then I’d put on a video of Russert, have them watch the man in action and afterwards we’d discuss at length the art of an expertly researched question. Read More. Have a love/hate relationship with your favorite TV show
and how the working mom characters are portrayed? Loathe the so-called
"mommy wars" on which the news media love to focus? Each week, Meredith
O'Brien's Working Moms in Pop Culture & Politics column on the Mommy Track'd website provides a reality check on how TV shows, movies, books and the media depict working moms.
A longtime journalist and mother of three, Meredith O'Brien teaches
journalism at the University of Massachusetts, is the author of A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.
