NBC’s Tim Russert dead at 58

NBC’s host of Meet the Press, senior vice president and Washington Bureau Chief, Tim Russert is dead of an apparent heart attack at age 58. MSNBC.com is reporting Russert was recording voice-overs for Sunday’s “Meet the Press” show in Washington when he collapsed.

Russert’s tough questioning and charming banter with guests made him a Sunday morning staple in millions of American homes.

For Tom Randall, 22, a Michigan State University computer science and engineering major from Lansing, the loss of Russert is deeply personal.

“Some of my earliest memories are watching Sunday morning TV with my dad, ‘Meet The Press’ especially,” he said in an email interview. He noted those memories go back to when he was 10 years old. “Once I moved out of the house, I kind of continued the tradition and rarely miss it on Sundays. For me, Sunday mornings are about political TV and Tim Russert is an essential part of that.”

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J.C. Kibbey, a James Madison College student at MSU has also been a viewer of the show. The 22-year-old remembers watching it with his father as well, although there was a break when the family did not have a television. Kibbey said he has recently re-devoted himself to the show.

“I liked him because he’s always been one of the few newsmen that really went in-depth about his coverage, which, coming of age in the Bush years, was something I was really hurting for,” Kibbey said. “Whereas I think my dad liked him because he was accessible and kind of folksy and didn’t put on airs. It appealed to him that a network news anchor could be behind ‘Big Russ and Me.’”

Both students said they valued the work Russert did in providing in-depth coverage of the elections, particularly this year’s primary election season.

“His interviews were always kind of sobering, in the sense that he wasn’t shy about getting down into the details with whoever the interviewee was,” said Randall. “He was one of the few people on TV who would hold people accountable for things they had said or done and grill them about it. So much of news is sensationalist or jumps from subject to subject, but Russert always seemed to slow things down and get deeper into the debate in ways no one else did.”

Both men concur they are not the average college student when it comes to watching “Meet the Press,” but both think young people will continue watching the show.

“While everybody, myself included, will really miss Tim and his unique perspective, young peoples’ excitement about politics isn’t going anywhere,” Kibbey said.

“I do think that with this election cycle and the amount of political energy flowing through young people right now,” Randall said, “that a lot more people were watching Tim and ‘Meet The Press’ than they ever were [before].”

Photo: Wikipedia.