Big Shoes

MarketWatch's Jon Friedman has a different candidate:

"David Gregory, familiar to NBC viewers for his White House coverage, should get the job. Chris Matthews should definitely not be under consideration.

"Gregory understands politics; he is a respected figure in Washington. True, he once had a reputation as a newsman who seemed to delight in tweaking and provoking politicians, especially President Bush.

"I could live without news people preening to get attention, but Gregory has come a long way. He has served his audience well by remembering that it's more important to inform than entertain viewers.

"Matthews, probably NBC News' most famous individual now that Russert has passed on, would be a horrendous selection. 'Meet the Press' doesn't need a host to put it on the map. It's already the most well-known and respected program of its kind."

It's little remembered now, but the man responsible for Russert's success is a former NBC News president, Michael Gartner, who recalls telling Russert that he was so interesting on the conference calls that he should be on the air. Russert said no.

"Eventually, he agreed to go on the Today show periodically to talk politics with his equally knowledgeable friend Al Hunt, at the time Washington bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, and, later, as an occasional panelist on the sagging Meet the Press show. But Russert remained mainly an inside guy, an unseen face, a choreographer of coverage.

"Finally, I told him he should be -- had to be -- the moderator of Meet the Press, which wasn't doing well. 'No way,' he said again.

"We argued. We debated. We fought. He raised objections, I shot them down. At the end, he said, 'Look, I can't do it. I'm ugly.' 'Well,' I said with a laugh, 'I can't argue that one (he had a chubby face that looked like it was made out of Play-Doh) but I'm not looking for a handsome guy, I'm looking for a smart one.' " Gartner had some sweatshirts made up: "Tim Russert/Not just a pretty face."

Have we gone overboard? The Orlando Sentinel's Hal Boedeker thinks so:

"The news needs to be a mix of stories. People needed to be reminded about the Iowa floods -- people are suffering on a grand scale there. But, of course, those people live far from the Washington Beltway, and so they won't gain the vast air time accorded to journalists and politicians.

"Will journalists ask the tough questions of themselves that they ask of others? Not during grief, evidently. Brokaw hinted that Russert had his critics. Could we have heard from them? Well, no. The coverage seemed designed to put Russert on the fast track to sainthood.