Tim Russert.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)

Our colleague Calvin Trillin once referred to the televised weekend bloviators from Washington as the "Sabbath Gasbags." Which was fair up to a point. Countless cubic feet of hot, polluted air are regularly unleashed into the national atmosphere by politicians and commentators on the networks and the cable stations, making life almost too easy for our most acute press critic, Jon Stewart. There would be no "Daily Show" without Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the (not quite so big anymore) Big Three. And yet Tim Russert, who died Friday at the age of fifty-eight, was a gifted and cunning Sunday-morning interrogator who, while never quite disturbing his genuine persona or television's conventions, used his outsized position on "Meet the Press" to rattle many more politicians than any of his on-air rivals did.

"Meet the Press," which began as a radio show in 1945 and debuted on NBC two years later, is the longest-running program on television, and Russert, who began hosting in 1991, was its longest-running presider. Print reporters often look down on their colleagues in television as overpaid, underprepared, and soft on power, but the print reporters who assembled on "Meet the Press" in the days of Lawrence E. Spivak, the program's originator, were rarely as probing as Russert was at his best. With the help of his staff, Russert was especially good at arming himself for an interview by compiling a politician's previous statements in all their contradictions. Google was his tool and Gotcha his game. But it was Gotcha at its highest form. Russert's gift was to employ his bluff, nice-guy, good-son Irish Catholic upstate persona ("Go Bills!") to offset the avidity with which he would trip up his interlocutors. Arianna Huffington, who once called Russert a "conventional wisdom zombie," was among the many critics who pressed him to go much further, but Russert, more than anyone with a remotely equivalent job, did not back off easily, whether it was with Dick Cheney, in 2002, peddling nonsense about Iraq or with Al Gore, in 2000, trying to ease his way out of a line of questioning on abortion:

RUSSERT: When do you think life begins?, GORE: I favor the Roe vs. Wade approach, but let me just say, Tim, I did--, RUSSERT: Which is what? When does life begin?, GORE: Let me just say, I did change my position on the issue of federal funding and I changed it because I came to understand more from women--women think about this differently than men., RUSSERT: But you were calling fetuses innocent human life, and now you don't believe life begins at conception. I'm just trying to find out, when do you believe life ...