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Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press for 17 years who died suddenly on June 13, seemed like a thoroughly decent guy to me. In the following days, Washington journalists, politicians, and his viewing public lauded him as a fine political analyst, a straight shooter, and a great family man.

In fact, we heard those things over and over again in what seemed to be an avalanche of memorial coverage. Was there too much. Was it out of proportion?

One way to determine this is to look at TV news coverage of the last big TV news figure to die, ABC’s Peter Jennings, on August 7, 2008. Jennings was a TV news anchor and reporter for more than 40 years, and was the chief anchor of World News Tonight for 22 years – one of the “Big Three” anchors through the 1980s and 1990s with Tom Brokaw at NBC and Dan Rather at CBS.

Here’s the breakdown, based on story times from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, of the first full day of evening news coverage for each.

Interestly, NBC devoted the entire 28:30 minutes of its Nightly News program on Russert’s death, even with Brian Williams anchoring via satellite from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In 2005 on ABC World News Tonight, most of the program covered Jennings’ death, but anchor Charles Gibson also saved five minutes for stories on a postponed Space Shuttle landing, an Iraqi sandstorm, energy policy, and gasoline prices.

The network news was about even in special coverage for the two. After Jenning’s death, ABC had three special commemorative broadcasts: an entire Nightline devoted to his memory, a half-hour tribute on the day he died, and a two-hour primetime tribute show three days later. After Russert’s death last week, NBC ran special remembrance editions of Dateline NBC, the Today Show, and Meet the Press. But, as Jack Shafer in Slate and others have observed, the praise-as-news about Russert continued to reverberate heavily through cable, blogs, and newspapers.

The results are interesting, given that Jennings had a much longer on-air career, and that he anchored five days a week, compared to Russert’s much smaller audiences for a niche Sunday morning program.

Of course, Russert was younger at 58, and his death by heart attack was more sudden than Jennings, who was 67 and signed off his last broadcast about three months before he died of lung cancer.

But, it’s also worth considering the competing news agenda. When Jennings died there were no other big news stories. When Russert died, there was the major continuing saga of 500-year floods in Iowa and the Upper Midwest.

Given the comparison to Jennings, I think the coverage of Russert’s death – with no disrespect to him or his family – was out of proportion.

Why? My analysis is that there is more to these narratives than just that a national news personality died.

Jennings, despite his long successful career (his newscast was rated first or second for most of his tenure) was more of a political outsider. Born in Canada, Jennings had a more international outlook of any of his anchor peers, and had spent several years as a foreign correspondent. It wasn’t until 2003 that he acquired U.S. citizenship, but conservatives regularly attacked him for “liberal bias” and a “European agenda.”

Russert, on the other hand, was one of the elite Washington beltway gang. As the son of a Buffalo, New York sanitation worker (Russert celebrated his dad “Big Russ” in a book) he was roundly praised for his “blue-collar sensibility.” But it was the mythology of his blue-collar origins that belied the fact that he was truly a Washington insider. He worked in politics with New York Sen. Daniel Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo before he got into news, and he clearly loved the “inside game” of politics.

Politicians of both parties liked him, because for all of his storied tough questioning, he was a guy who played by the polite rules of Washington, where the worst a liar can do is “misspeak.” Tellingly, Cathie Martin, Dick Cheney’s spokesperson, testified in the 2007 perjury trial of Scooter Libby that when the administration was criticized for overstating the case for war against Iraq, their strategy was to put Cheney on Russert’s show, where they thought they could control the message. “I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used,” she said. “It’s our best format.”

Being favored by Dick Cheney’s handlers doesn’t sound like a case for the journalism hall of fame, though.

In the case of Russert, we should consider what small impact “public affairs” journalism like Meet the Press has in these days of The Daily Show, social networking on the Internet, and Obama’s nontraditional campaign. I think the New York Times’ Media Equation columnist David Carr got it right when he observed that the mourning seemed not only for Russert, but an attempt to celebrate and shore up the increasingly irrelevant establishment political journalism.

Iowa journalists deserve a lot of credit and time to catch their breath. They have been covering, almost nonstop, the tragic weather we’ve been having since the monster F5 tornado swept through Parkersburg, New Hartford, and Dunkerton on May 25.

Then came the floods. This has been a bad several weeks for sleep if you are an Eastern Iowa TV meteorologist, but I salute them for their stamina and sharp analysis. (In fact, as KWWL’s Mark Schnackenberg wisely reminded viewers, the flooding had its roots in our extra-snowy winter, which set the conditions for oversaturated ground in the spring.)

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier continued to chronicle our daily challenges, despite the flooding that required its newsroom to temporarily move to Hawkeye Community College and the Cedar Rapids Gazette to print its newspapers in the interim (even as Cedar Rapids began to flood).

KWWL got knocked off the air twice, but came back up with generators, and Waterloo radio stations made similar recoveries. Tara Thomas worked nonstop eight-hour newscasts, once as the sole anchor at KWWL while Ron Steele reported live from Cedar Rapids as more thunderstorms dumped on the city and the river was about to crest.

Thomas, who is visibly pregnant on air and expecting a baby around July 31 said that she received many emails from viewers who thought her long hours were “cruel and unusual punishment.”

She said that doing eight hours of wall-to-wall coverage is “mentally taxing,” but she assured me that she survived the long hours in good health. But, one of the most difficult things for Thomas and others at KWWL? After their basement backed up with sewage, they were without indoor plumbing for about a week. Everyone at Channel 7 resorted to the porta-potties out back.

KCRG’s downtown Cedar Rapids studios were surrounded by water, and maintained power only with a generator, but they worked nonstop newscasts, too, with excellent updates of the conditions as floodwaters consumed the city. I actually feared for the life of a KGAN reporter who continued to report live during a Cedar Rapids thunderstorm as other stations took a break. (Reminder: You don’t really wanted to be standing in floodwaters and holding a mike, in the proximity of the very tall metal transmitter pole of your news truck as lighting flashes nearby.) But he did an excellent job of showing how quickly the waters were rising in Cedar Rapids.

Downtown Cedar Falls may have been saved by sandbaggers, but the Times was temporarily forced out of its offices when downtown was evacuated. The affiliated Waverly Newspapers team lost everything in its office in the flood. Anelia Dimitrova’s Cedar Falls home became the temporary office for the newspaper group.

Across all of the Eastern Iowa news media, there have been extraordinary, award-winning efforts on the print and broadcast sides. There has been a true sense of mission in their journalism as the tornados and floods made immediately clear what the public interest is.

Reporters couldn’t be everywhere. KCRG anchors Bruce Aune and Beth Malicki apologized on air for not being able to get a reporter to the small town of Palo, which was completely under water. Jon Ericson, the Courier’s Cedar Falls beat reporter, wrote an honest editorial piece about how the story of flooded North Cedar could have been covered better, but it was difficult to get access to that side of the river. A Register reporter even got arrested trying to get into a flooded Des Moines neighborhood.

The local journalists covered this with much more dedication and range than the national journalists who tend to pop in, cover our weather disasters for a few days, then leave. I am reminded that Ron Steele had to follow up an NBC report by reminding viewers that the national guy slipped up in his map reading: the Des Moines River, not the Cedar, runs through Des Moines.

I am also reminded that when Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, died suddenly on June 13, the national TV networks dropped Iowa as the top story just as the 500-year flood crested in Cedar Rapids, flooding 400 city blocks and displacing 25,000 people. No disrespect to the Russert family, but a 500-year flood happens only every…well, you get the point. Again, the national news media are easily distracted by stories that happen literally down the hall from them.

After big floods in 1993, 1999, and 2008, there will be important stories to follow up, and these are questions that regional journalists can best ask: Do we draw new lines and redefine what a “100-year” and “500-year” flood is? How should cities in Eastern Iowa rebuild themselves? How can the region restore more wetlands to hold rain waters and relieve pressure on levies and floodwalls?

Farmers can tile their fields so they drain quickly, and cities can build higher and higher dikes. But there are times it rains and rains, and the water needs to go somewhere. It would be nice to begin the long-term planning to decide where the water can easily flow, rather than deal with troubled waters once again.

We all need to talk about this, and journalists can keep this on our agenda.

It happened again. The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier had a special “green” tabloid section in their Sunday, April 20 newspaper, with big full-page ad by LS Power. After doing the same thing last year, it appears that Courier is operating in an irony-free zone where “green” and “coal-fired power plant” can mean the same thing.

In case you don’t remember, LS Power is the New Jersey company that wants to build a 750-megawatt coal-burning power plant in Waterloo. For scale, this is nearly 15 times the size of the Cedar Falls Utilities coal-burning power plant. LS Power will ship coal to Waterloo in railcars, burn it, and then sell the power to other states.

Why do they want to build here, and not closer to their energy customers? Because they calculate that small towns with small economies are more likely to say “yes” to jobs and promises of big money. Despite the calculation, there has been a strong grassroots citizen effort by Community Energy Solutions, the Sierra Club, and Plains Justice to halt the plant. LS Power has responded by trying to buy compliance from community leaders.

They have already effectively bought the silence of KBBG last year with the announcement that they would give the African-American owned radio station located near the proposed plant $100,000 if the plant gets built. LS Power also floated the idea of a $400,000 grant to the University of Northern Iowa for the research of biofuels.

The local building trades union long ago pledged to support the project. (Incredibly, the Courier and KWWL, Ch. 7, ran this old news as “breaking news” in late March, right before a zoning hearing. If there was any news here, it was that the plant promises to use nonunion labor as well.)

City of Waterloo politicians are all delighted about the coal-burning plant too, thinking that anything that promises them an $800,000 in annual tax revenue to spend must be good.

Has the Courier’s ability to critically investigate every part of LS Power’s proposal been diluted, too, by full-page ad buys?

When it comes to the proposed power plant, the Courier and KWWL have been consistently boosterish. In doing so, they have dropped the ball on having a real discussion about what the future of the Cedar Valley should be, and whether or not the economic benefits of the kind of power plant that is the leading cause of global warming and air and water pollution outweigh the environmental and health disadvantages. Instead, they have covered the “official” story of business development, meetings, and politicians.

If good journalism should be a civic forum that addresses the most important issues a community faces, this isn’t it.

Honestly, though, the full-page ad’s claim in big letters that “It’s Helping the Cedar Valley Go Green,” is about the most outlandish thing imaginable. I’ve seen a lot of lists on helpful hints on how to “go green,” but not one of them suggests building a gargantuan 750-megawatt coal-burning plant.

Which brings me to the “Go Green” tabloid section. Give the Courier credit for helping us thinking about going green.

Yes, we should all change our light bulbs to compact fluorescents (saves 160 pounds of CO2 emissions a year), set the water heater below 120 degrees (900 pounds a year), and recycle household packaging (1,000 pounds a year).

But this individual consumerist model of going green will never encourage citizens to democratically participate in the biggest decisions about the environment, like a public transportation policy, regional planning of development, and public utility energy choices.

So the biggest helpful hint the Courier should have given us in “Go Green” is this: stop a 750-megawatt coal-burning power plant from being built. Saves 6,769,239 tons per year.

That’s right. Almost 7 million tons of CO2 emissions saved a year, according to LS Power’s own data, from their preliminary application to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, that’s the equivalent to annual greenhouse gas emissions from 1,124,714 passenger vehicles a year, or the annual CO2 emissions from the electricity use of 813,371 homes for one year (about two-thirds of all Iowa households).

So, by all means, eat locally grown food (saves 5,000 pounds of greenhouse emissions a year), take the bus to work (1,590 pounds), and wash your clothes in cold water (700 pounds). But if you really want to “Go Green,” do what people are already doing all over the country: stop the construction of a new coal-burning power plant.

The recording industry has been fuming about file swappers illegally downloading songs and cutting into recorded music sales for years. The industry’s frustration must have escalated even higher when the Grammy Award-winning British alternative rock group Radiohead decided to give away their 2007 album “In Rainbows” on the Internet (www.inrainbows.com) for whatever price fans wished to pay, including nothing at all.

For their seventh studio album, Radiohead was free to try its own business approach. Its contract with record corporation EMI had expired after its previous album, 2003’s “Hail to the Thief,” and it turned down multimillion dollar offers to sign a new contract with major labels. It also had millions of fans around the world. So they decided to try an experiment by offering their seventh studio album, “In Rainbows,” online with a tip jar approach.

“It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation,” Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, said in a Wired magazine interview. “We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.”

Radiohead didn’t disclose the sales revenue or numbers of downloads, but one source claimed at least 1.2 million copies of the album were downloaded in the first two days. In an interview with an Australian newspaper, Yorke revealed that about 50 percent of the downloaders took the album for free. But, a study by comScore conservatively estimated that Radiohead made an average of $2.26 on its album downloads. If that’s the case, Radiohead may have still have made more money per recording than the royalties they might have earned with a release by a major label. That would surely leave recording industry executives weeping.

Still, there remains a market for albums releases in compact disc form. In January 2008, after Radiohead ended the three-month availability of “In Rainbows” and released the album in CD form, it immediately became the top-selling album in the U.S., confirming a level of continuing viability for the CD, even as it is threatened by digital downloads.

Although Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said the online album release experiment was not supposed to be a model for anyone else, it ended up being just that. Hip hop artist Saul Williams released digital downloads of “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust” (niggytardust.com) for $5, with a “free” option to the first 100,000 customers.

Williams’ recording was produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Just a few weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails released “Ghosts I-IV,” a four-album recording with 36 songs, at ghosts.nin.com. “Ghost I,” the package of the first nine songs, were available for free download along with a 40-page pdf file of images to accompany the entire recording. The rest of the 36 digital song files were available for purchase for only $5. CDs could be bought for $10, or in a $75 Deluxe Edition Package, or the Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition for $300.

Despite the no-cost and inexpensive options, all 2500 ultra-deluxe packages were sold out in just a few days. This suggests that even if CDs cease to be the main format for music in the coming years, they will likely live on in collector’s packages.

The new forms of music distribution by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and other artists characterize an entire music industry in transition. In 2007, The Eagles released “Long Road out of Eden.” Despite the fact that it was released on the Eagle’s own independent label and sold only through their Web site (eaglesband.com) and Wal-Mart stores, it was one of the best selling albums of 2007.

Veteran performers Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney, and James Taylor also shunned major labels, and released new recordings through Starbuck’s Hear Music label. And iTunes surpassed Target and Best Buy to become the nation’s No. 2 music seller, just behind Wal-Mart.

Given the upward trajectory of digital download sales and the downward trajectory of CD sales, the only thing clear about the music industry is that iTunes will eventually displace Wal-Mart as the top music seller.

The writers’ strike is over, and guess what? We all survived.

Back around November 5, when the Writers Guild of America first called a strike against the major entertainment studios, there were almost hysterical reports in the news media — what are we going to do without new episodes of our favorite TV programs? Like, Omigosh!

The January 25 Entertainment Weekly even had a special “Strike Survival Guide” issue with cover of a bearded Conan O’Brien (who, along with David Letterman, used the time off the screen to watch his facial hair grow) that boasted “67 tips to beat the entertainment dry spell.” One of the tips? TV cooking diva Rachael Ray, who has built a media empire on how to cook meals in less than 30 minutes, proposed spending 120 minutes preparing a beef stew dish.

It turns out there have been more interesting things to do than making labor-intensive stew or watching hair grow.

First, there was football. The New England Patriots capped a perfect season by losing to the New York Giants in a beautiful closing-minutes drive. This ended up being the highest rated Super Bowl of all time, and Fox earned a whopping $250 million on all of those $2.7 million 30-second advertisements.

Second–and this makes us seem much more high-minded–there is presidential politics. Turnouts for caucuses and primaries have been at record levels almost everywhere (and Iowans can give themselves a little pat on the back for getting this started).

It’s exciting to have more people talking about who might be the new president rather than what happened to the housewives on Wisteria Lane or that island where all of those people are Lost. Even the cable news networks are attracting large audiences for their election coverage.

Perhaps it’s because this political season, there are real choices for Americans. I’m reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 where he reported on the Nixon-McGovern race. Thompson wrote a couple sentences that sum up the usual American electoral experience better than anything else I’ve ever read.

He wrote that Americans are often told, “we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.” This time it feels different — maybe more like a Ford, Lexus, MINI Cooper, Toyota Prius, and Subaru. [Feel free to use your own list of cars to complete the comparison.]

The end of the strike now means that unlike NBC’s lame attempt at a Golden Globes show, ABC will have a fully scripted Academy Awards broadcast on Sunday evening, February 24. After the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards show is television’s biggest payday, so it’s no surprise that Disney (which owns ABC) CEO Robert Iger was one of the main studio heads who became involved in softening the studio position.

Overall, the strike gave the writers the necessary leverage in making their case. One writer told the Deadline Hollywood Daily blog “Like everyone else, I have concerns about the deal, but overall I think it’s a win for us, and I have no doubt that it’s a deal we never would have come close to receiving without the strike.”

The biggest issue for the writers was establishing a system of residuals for television and movies distributed through the Internet. The writers weren’t going to get sold short with the development of a new distribution route.

In the 1980s, the writers signed contracts that established what turned out to be an obscenely low royalty rate for the then-emerging home video format. The studios made out well — they now make the majority of their movie revenue on video sales and rentals (box office receipts are a distant second). But, writers only received about four cents in royalties for each $20 DVD sold.

With this agreement, the writers got raise on their DVD royalties and a foothold on the Internet market, and will earn reasonable royalties for streaming television programs and movie downloads.

The Guild also wanted to include writers of reality programs (yes, reality programs do have writers!) under the union contract for pay and benefits, but this didn’t make it into the agreement. Look for this issue to come back when the new contract expires in 2011.

For now, new episodes for this season’s comedies and dramas won’t be ready until April. But who cares? We have a wonderful political drama that will carry us through November.

Photo: courtesy Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetgordon/1940722505/

A letter sent to Clark Hoyt, Public Editor of the New York Times , Friday, Jan. 25, 2008

Dear Mr. Hoyt,

Today the New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Fair enough. But the editorial, written by this particular editorial board, seems to violate the Times’ own Ethical Journalism handbook.

As the beginning of your guidelines states,

“The goal of The New York Times is to cover the news as impartially as possible — “without fear or favor,” in the words of Adolph Ochs, our patriarch — and to treat readers, news sources, advertisers and others fairly and openly, and to be seen to be doing so. The reputation of The Times rests upon such perceptions, and so do the professional reputations of its staff members. Thus The Times and members of its news department and editorial page staff share an interest in avoiding conflicts of interest or an appearance of a conflict.”

Yet a clear conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one, exists. Two of the board’s 18 members are former (Bill) Clinton administration officials. David Shipley, the deputy editorial page editor and op-ed editor, was a special assistant to the president and senior presidential speechwriter from 1995 to 1997. Carolyn Curiel was special assistant to the president and senior presidential speechwriter for Clinton’s first term, and later appointed by him to be ambassador in Belize.

The Times lists this biographical information on its web site, which is a good move towards transparency. But, the Times does not note this conflict of interest anywhere in the editorial itself, where such information would be most useful to readers. (Ironically, the Times guidelines list the deputy editorial page editor–presently David Shipley–as the contact person for most conflict of interest situations.)

How are the readers to know that the editorial board members with former professional relationships with one of the candidates (from the web site biographies, it does not appear that any of the other board members held Democratic or Republican political positions) did not prevent candidates Obama and Edwards from gaining equal consideration from the board? What were the procedures to deal with this conflict, or the appearance of one?

Sincerely,

Christopher R. Martin