Sex, Booze & Surveys: Journos Gone Wild

Engel, who overcame dyslexia as a child, has just been tapped to open a Beirut bureau for NBC. He is looking forward to covering the region but says he thrives on war coverage and will continue to spend time in Iraq. "I'm not a cowboy," he says. "You can't throw caution to the wind."

Riling Russert

Tim Russert is accustomed to asking tough questions, so he was hardly intimidated by the prospect of a short feature interview in the New York Times Magazine tied to his new book, "Wisdom of Our Fathers."

But in an appearance on C-SPAN Friday, the "Meet the Press" host called the published version "misleading, callous and hurtful."

Russert says by telephone that the Times columnist, Deborah Solomon, had pitched the conversation as a Mother's Day interview, and that half the hour-long discussion was about his mother, who died of cancer last year.

Not only was that not reflected in the story, Russert says, but Solomon selectively edited two exchanges to make it appear that he was ducking the subject.

In the May 14 piece -- headlined "All About My Father" -- Solomon asked whether Russert would ever write a book about his mother, Betty, now that he had "heroized" fathers with an earlier book about his dad.

"Can you tell us what your mother taught you?" Solomon asked. Russert talked about a Mother's Day message from his hometown pastor that he said he often discussed with his mom.

The next paragraph: "You still haven't answered the question of what your mom taught you. What do you do on 'Meet the Press' if your guests fail to answer your questions?"

Russert says those two questions were run together -- leaving out a long answer about his mother and skipping directly to his response about the program -- in a way that made him look evasive.

Solomon does not deny merging the questions and omitting the answer but says Russert's response -- about how he flew to his mother's bedside when she was dying -- was off the point. She calls such editing routine.

"I was surprised that a man who is so accomplished would feel so wounded by the interview, which as I told him was rather gentle," Solomon says, adding: "Newspeople can often be the most impossible to interview because they're used to controlling the story themselves."

In a letter to the Times, Russert wrote: "My mom was a central figure in my life. This is my first Mother's Day without her. Miss Solomon's deliberate mischaracterization of our conversation and her feeble attempt at humor made it a particularly painful day."