
RIP, Tim Russert - terpua
http://gigaom.com/2008/06/13/rip-tim-russert/
======
Prrometheus
Not Hacker News.

Sorry, but I already found out that Russert was dead from a dozen different
news sources.

Also, he was never "fair" to both sides of the aisle. Sometimes he was in
attack mode, sometimes he would switch to kid-gloves mode (I remember him
giving a particularly easy interview to Mike Huckabee on the eve of the Iowa
primary, and that is a man with a LOT of "interesting" issues to talk about).
Maybe he was special in the world of journalists because he actually had an
attack mode. But let him be praised for what he was, and not an idealized
vision of what he never was.

~~~
dfranke
I don't have a problem with this one. It's mainstream news, but it's
mainstream news that's actually relevant to people, as opposed to, say,
celebrity gossip. It has no special relevance to hackers, but it's still just
as relevant to us as to anyone else. Stories of this magnitude come up in the
media maybe once a month. Having a single post about them show up on news.yc
isn't going to drown out the signal.

~~~
icey
This: "It has no special relevance to hackers" is the key. We have general
news sites for general news. I'm sure we all know how to get there. Nobody is
going to be informed for the first time that Tim Russert has died by coming
here. So now you have to ask yourself, what does it add to the conversation?

This is not a general news aggregator, we have those in spades, and the
chances are that we all know where to find them. It's disheartening that this
has gotten so many upvotes.

~~~
dfranke
news.yc is not just a news aggregator. It's also a community, one which is
populated by people whose opinions I value more than those on general news
aggregators. I might not be reading about Tim Russert's death for the first
time, but I might still read something insightful about it that I wouldn't
have seen elsewhere. You could fill the front page with articles about
knitting, and if you could still get the same group of people to hang around,
it would be still be more interesting than a typical day on Digg.

------
niels_olson
I think Hacker News just jumped the shark.

------
terpua
He was the best interviewer I have seen. Fair to both sides of the aisle.

Will miss MTP without him.

[http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/06/23/080623ta_talk_remni...](http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/06/23/080623ta_talk_remnick)

~~~
mynameishere
Good example of a harmless comment that got downmodded hard.

~~~
Darmani
I'm not so certain that comment's harmless. I'd honestly say that comment is
not too far from comments such as "Me too" and "I agree," a type of comment
that contains no substance and spreads the message that it is acceptable to
write comments with no substance.

I would really like to see some insights or examples of what makes Tim
especially fair or a great interviewer. :)

~~~
mynameishere
Well, it's just an obit entry. "In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon
oath." - SJ

~~~
Darmani
Death is the best time to reflect upon life.

As an interesting sidenote, I didn't know who SJ was, so I googled that quote.
Your comment here was the first result out of 850

------
LPTS
I know the american tradition is to not speak ill of the dead. But I've never
been one for tradition, so...

One less fevered ego tainting our collective unconscious. Good.

Fair to both sides of the aisle?. Which is why Dick Cheney preferred to go on
his show because of the message control. And why he allowed people to put
things off the record after interviews. Let's not pretend he represented
journalism or that the times he did call people on things, it wasn't just
picking on sacrificial lambs so he could maintain a thin veneer of
responsibility behind which he could hide the powerful people he ultimately
protected. He was fair to everyone except the american people. He's dead now.
He hurt America. Millions of people die every day. I can't believe there
aren't hundreds of thousands of them more worth this outpouring of grief.

My condolences to his family, and to the powerful elites who depended on his
show to control the way they distributed propaganda to the masses.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You know, I thought about this for a while before down-voting it. I very
rarely downvote -- maybe I have downvoted ten times in the last year.

Let's review:

"Not hacker news" <\- great comment

"One less fevered ego tainting our collective unconscious. Good." <\- personal
attack on someone you didn't know and who can't defend themselves in this
forum.

That kind of brazen disregard for humanity is anathema to any organized
conversation, in my opinion. I'd down-vote you again if I could.

As a political junkie, I like watching the Sunday-morning talkers. Yes,
Russert was a democrat and had worked on several campaigns before joining NBC,
but he was good at what he did and brought a joy to his work that was
infectious. I'm sure he did a lot of good and bad things, but most of all he
was a human, a human I spent several dozen hours watching over the course of
my life. He deserves better than that comment.If it's not for the board, fair
enough.

You know, it's quite possible to disagree with people, even hate their
behavior, without demonizing the person themselves. "Powerful elites [using]
his show to control the way they distributed propaganda"?? I feel like I need
a shower after reading it.

This, friends, is why politics shouldn't be on HN. If you feel you need to
launch into some tirade about multi-national corporations using mind control
to enslave the population, take it somewhere else.

I don't think this story had to be political at all. Famous talking-head dies.
What sorts of neat startup attributes did he have?

~~~
robg
"What sorts of neat startup attributes did he have?"

That, I think, is a great question. To me, Russert exemplified the best of his
profession without sacrificing himself or his work. By all accounts, he was a
great guy who did a great job (qualifications aside about the state of the
American media, esp with regard to politics). If folks say the same of me when
I'm gone, it will have been a life well-lived, indeed.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I remember in the 2000 election mess, Russet pulls out a whiteboard and on
national TV starts sketching out some ideas about how things might play out.

He was so absorbed in his work he was looking at "what's the best tool right
now to get from point A to point B" not necessarily what the most or least
telegenic thing to do might be.

I believe he's the guy who gave us the entire concept of "red states" and
"blue states"

I'm sure he had a lot of faults, but it's obvious he was competing well at a
national level, and having a blast doing it.

If I remember, in the last year or two the network bought him some huge
freaking interactive map to use on the air. He used it once and then went back
to the whiteboard -- the whiteboard was just enough functionality to do what
he needed and not any more.

Lots of good startup lessons here -- or at the very least lots of good life
lessons.

~~~
robg
By all accounts, "having a blast doing it" describes him perfectly. And he
managed to not make many enemies, if at all. That's a quite a feat.

It was fun first.

EDIT: Funny to me that this comment and its parent just got voted down. That's
some spite. See, bemoan the state of the American media all you want. But
Russert was one of its shining stars - a force of good where most is trivial.
We should all aspire to stand out similarly.

