Faculty, students and staff at USC Annenberg mourn the sudden death of Tim Russert, remembering him for his journalistic and political expertise and objectivity.
Russert, a leading U.S. political correspondent and host of NBC's long-running "Meet the Press" talk show, died June 13 of a heart attack. He was 58. As host of "Meet the Press," he won two Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, a project of USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center.
"It’s an enormous loss to political commentary and analysis," said journalism professor Judy Muller, an Emmy Award-winning television correspondent and National Public Radio commentator. "Few people anymore have the experience and depth of a Tim Russert. What he did so well was play devil’s advocate. He researched his guests so intensely that when they sat down in that chair across from him, he was able to ask questions from the other point of view. And he didn’t know how to throw a softball question.
"It’s awful for a family to lose a husband and a father," Muller continued, "and it’s sad for our country that we won’t have that voice at the Democratic and Republican conventions. We’re going to miss his voice. He was such a great analyst on the spot. It’ll be a void for sure."
Said Martin Kaplan, Norman Lear Center director and holder of the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment: "Tim Russert embodied the essence of Beltway journalism. Whatever the knock on mainstream media coverage is, in Tim's hands it also had a dazzling upside: access to the most powerful people in government, a mastery of background material, a passion for politics, a flair for storytelling. I knew him for 30 years, and I never met anyone in Washington more adept at or more enchanted by the filigree of American politics."
