What Matters to Tim Russert

Brendan Nyhan made a chart out of Tim Russert's interview with Rudy Giuliani which helps illustrate why liberals and conservatives alike often find watching Meet the Press to be a frustrating experience. Here's Rudy bringing some new notions to the table about foreign policy -- namely that the country needs to double-down on the High Bush Doctrine policies of 2002-2003 -- and all Russert wants to talk about are scandals.

If you think Giuliani is a profound and original thinker on national security issues and that his decision to associate himself with Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Norm Podhoretz, etc. reflects well on him, Russert seems to be denying Rudy his chance at a fair hearing.

If, by contrast, you see the Giuliani campaign as chock-a-block with lunatic fringe ideas, Russert is allowing the true danger here to go essentially unexamined. As Brendan puts it, "there are certainly serious ethical questions about Guiliani. But these pale in comparison to questions about how he would conduct himself in office, particularly when it comes to foreign policy." He has no experience with foreign policy whatsoever, and has surrounded himself with an advisory team that contains almost no experience as practitioners and whose ideas are far outside of the mainstream and were overwhelmingly discredited by events in Bush's first term.

Comments

That's all very intersting but for my money Brendan Nyhan is a serious weasel. If I ever see him at Down Under I will pour a beer on his weaselly little head.

That is all.

Posted by The Fool | December 10, 2007 12:42 PM

I'm afraid I find the implied criticism here rather trifling. So Russert is obsessed with ethics and honesty over policy matters. It is relevant here that ethics and honesty are important topics when politics is discussed on television, no? How easily we forget that the large yellow chunk could equally easily be labeled "War on Christmas" or "Osama bin Laden wants to kill you."

Posted by Martin | December 10, 2007 1:46 PM

I didn't see the interview, but this way of quantifying it -- or any such appearance -- is seriously flawed. Nyhan bases this entirely on the interview's word count, but doesn't say if he's counting all the words in the transcript or just Russert's questions. That's a very big problem, and even people who hate the media should see that.

Say Russert asked a question about ethics, like "Mayor Giuliani, did the cops add spice to your love life?" Giuliani could answer tersely or he could ramble on and on and on. ("Tim, let me explain how I made sweet, sweet love to my mistress without charging taxpayers, blah blah blah." ) In addition, Giuliani could let something fall in the response ("blah blah blah, and that's one of the reasons I told Bernie Kerik to pay for the heroin with library funds") which would demand a follow-up.

Conversely, Russert could ask a question like, "What should we do about Syria?" If Giuliani said, "Bomb 'em" and shut his mouth despite repeated follow-ups ("What? Are you mad?"), it would seem foreign policy got short shrift.

The word count, in other words, can not give a sense of the interviewer's priorities. It may suggest where the subject felt the need to talk at length, or where follow-ups were demanded, but it's a very poor way to judge an interview. If you wanted equal time spent on each question, you could leave many things unanswered.

Giuliani: I wouldn't be the man I am today without cannibalism. The sweet taste of human flesh gives me the strength to defend America.

Russert: Well, mayor, that's 2000 words on that topic, so we have to move on.

Posted by Brian | December 10, 2007 1:48 PM

The qualifications noted by Brian and Martin are important.

But Nyhan still might be getting at a larger issue here.

Russert, like many pundits, views politics as dinner theater. So instead of asking about all of the catastrophic policies that Giuliani favors, he's much more likely to try to trip him up and make him appear to be (gasp!) a flip-flopper. And if you're not a plain-spoken guy who America wants to have a beer with, well, then you don't deserve elective office, regardless of whatever it is you'd actually do to affect people's lives once you're there.

Now, it just so happens that Giuliani has left a trail of devastation and scandal at every office and relationship in his life. So even a blind pig will happen upon a truffle hither and thither in his past. But there may well be a larger point here. It just can't be proven with word count from one show.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | December 10, 2007 2:47 PM

I did see the interview, and I think the complaint is valid. Much of what goes in the yellow slice wasn't really about ethics and honesty at all, but lame attempts at some sort of "gotcha" scandal-monger's wisecrack--didn't your law firm represent Hugo Chavez? Wasn't a member of the government of Qatar when you worked for them as a consultant a defender of Al Qaida figures? Rudy handled those questions with ease, while he might have had a much harder time if given "a fair hearing" on his patently insane foreign policy beliefs.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 10, 2007 3:29 PM

Pipes has been maligned unfairly for a long time but nobody seems to able to find anything to "discredit" him with. Kramer is more widely liked but if you search in his books and websites you just won't find much to hold against him. Certainly you can't "discredit" him. Podhoretz has lately become very controversial, to be sure. But most of his stuff is many years old and off the web, and I am not that familiar with him recently.

Anyway, advisers are not the candidate. We all wish that George W Bush was as experienced as his advisers. Likewise with Hillary and Obama.

Posted by JFred | December 10, 2007 3:51 PM

As Martin said, Nyhan's groupings lack definition, so a question about Qatar could be about ethical lapses or foreign policy. The point is that the word count alone does not reflect what Russert's priorities were, or the substance of the responses. It's a bit amusing to me that a man who "counters rhetoric with reason" resorts to a poorly-applied statistic to make a point.

Posted by Brian | December 10, 2007 4:00 PM

Robert Powell: "his patently insane foreign policy beliefs."

That is, the same beliefs that underlie everything Powell says in every one of his posts except this one.

JFred: "Pipes has been maligned unfairly for a long time but nobody seems to able to find anything to "discredit" him with."

Uh, like every word out of his mouth?

"Podhoretz has lately become very controversial, to be sure. But most of his stuff is many years old and off the web, and I am not that familiar with him recently."

Then how do you know he's become controversial if you're not that familiar with him recently? Osmosis?

He's not "controversial", he's a fucking war-mongering loony tune.

"We all wish that George W Bush was as experienced as his advisers."

No, we don't. His advisers are either corrupt or incompetent or both.

Which makes you an idiot.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 10, 2007 7:21 PM

Yeah, but what we want to know is why Rudy was shrieking with laughter through the whole thing. Gave "presidential bearing" a whole new meaning. How do Republicans master this psychopath-buffoon combination so naturally?

Posted by SqueakyRat | December 10, 2007 7:52 PM

I don't know -maybe Russert knows that being endorsed by a washed up, warmongering assclown like Norm Podhoretz is enough of an indictment of Giuliani's lack of foreign policy savvy. But when has Tim Russert ever NOT hedged his bets?

Tim's efforts to paint Rudy as Bush 2.0 were not lost on the critical minds watching Sunday's interview. The way I see it, the emphasis on scandals was aimed at the unfortunate abundance of lazy imbeciles in the American electorate who base their voting decisions on tabloid fodder -and it will work wonders.

Personally, I don't need a 30-minute dissertation on Giuliani's ample scandal record to know he's an opportunistic, egomaniacal liar and a political hack. He does a fine job spelling it out himself every time he has to squirm his way out of a tough allegation.

Posted by Someone | December 10, 2007 10:30 PM

The more obvious problem with this graph is that it lacks a significant wedge for "Go Bills!"

Posted by scrod | December 11, 2007 9:02 AM