The Newseum will display Russert's office "reassembled to look as it did June 13, 2008, the day Russert died of a heart attack at age 58," beginning in November. The only other journalist to merit an office recreation at the Newseum is Edward R. Murrow.

It's been more than a year since Russert's death, so by now it's OK to say about his memory what we were saying about him when he was still alive: He was a handmaiden masquerading as a watchdog, and the reason people went on his show wasn't because he was an "institution" or "tough but fair"—it was because he was safe and predictable but had the unearned reputation of being aggressive and relentless. But whatever: Let's stipulate that he was a towering genius. We're still recreating his office in a museum?

Here's what Lewis Lapham had to say on Russert's funeral, attended by all the grandees he claimed to torment:

Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession.

Anyway, what's in the office? A WHOLE BUNCH OF JUNK ABOUT THE FUCKING BUFFALO BILLS.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Respected Israel newspaper Haaretz did something different on June 10: they had their reporters take the day off, and they "sent 31 of Israel's finest authors and poets to cover the day's news." How'd that go?

The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: "I didn't watch TV yesterday." And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled "Summer Sonnet."

As expected.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Boston Globe is spending up to a million bucks on an ad campaign to promote itself, even as it's cutting tens of millions from its budget. Yea, ad people will tell you it's an investment that will pay for itself, blah blah. We're not so sure. How about running a million bucks worth of ads in the Boston Globe, then? Bigger news hole, too! Oh and more Boston people are interested in maybe buying it.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of Tim Russert's death. Read some reminiscences from his pals, here. He was not so bad compared to the current menu of options.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.AVN Media, the king of porn industry trade magazines, is consolidating four of its six monthly magazines into one. Let's hope Novelty Business Magazine is not finished—in these times, Americans need novelty more than ever. Especially the children.

Tim Russert took Syracuse University's Fred Dressler award last year. This year, the prize, awarded by the university's Newhouse communications school, will go to Arianna Huffington, who hated Russert and his wife Maureen Orth and reportedly hired a private investigator to tail them as part of a 15-year feud.

We're guessing NBC won't be buying a table again this year.

(The announcement of Huffington's prize is expected later today; the school circulated early word of the award to a prize-related email list.)

Also awkward: The finalists include, in one category, David Barstow's Pulitzer-winning exposé on shill generals in the New York Times — and in another category a takedown of that very exposé as "selective" and "misleading," by Rachel Sklar, then of the Huffington Post.

Sklar, meanwhile, left Arianna Huffington's website after having some of her coverage spiked for violating "HuffPost's editorial position" on political matters and after reportedly being pulled back from TV appearances. So presumably she's not sitting at Arianna's table.

The mingling should be interesting. If you're going, bring a flask.

He tells useless WP media regurgitator Howie Kurtz:

"I'd be crazy if I wasn't nervous about it," Gregory said. "Succeeding Tim Russert is humbling, and I think I'm appropriately nervous."

And on the same day, told the NYT:

In a telephone interview, Mr. Gregory, who is 38, acknowledged that the task before him was challenging. “I’m honored,” he said. “I feel humbled and very excited. I’m not nervous or apprehensive about it, but it is daunting.”

WELL ARE YOU OR AREN'T YOU? He hasn't even started and already, scandal.

NBC has to want Couric for Meet The Press. Her interview with Sarah Palin was the most memorable television of the election and arguably changed its course. Even before that, Couric's sit-downs for Today were fondly remembered. But she's expensive, with $40 million left on her $15-million-a-year CBS contract.

And should Couric even take the job, assuming NBC offered, complete with an attractive salary? The situation at Meet The Press parallels the CBS Evening News a bit too closely, perhaps.

The show is heavy on old-school, old-media respectability but short on ratings upside. Yes, Russert grew viewership and kept the show in the lead even among younger viewers. But the long-running — longest-running, actually, after 60 years — show has a reserved approach that would strain to compete with the likes of the Daily Show should the show try and tack in that more opinionated direction amid continued weak ratings (numbers have, naturally, fallen since Russert's death). It wasn't long ago that Kurt Andersen wondered in New York if Meet The Press "will simply cease to exist."

Maybe Couric should just bank the $40 million and devote herself to her quirky YouTube channel once her contract is up. She could no doubt use a break from sweating the ratings every night. (Thank God there's none of that sort of pressure online!)

• The New Yorker's Lauren Collins briefly depicts Huffington holding hands with ex-boyfriend Mort Zuckerman at the recent Time 100 party. But who is she seeing now? Is it true she tends toward hot younger men? What about her rumored dalliance with Newark Mayor Cory Booker?
• Collins also delves into the much-explored topic of Huffington's affiliation with spiritual guru John-Roger. But what about how she has stocked her site with fans of the culty leader?
• Just one paragraph on the Tim Russert feud? Can she still not come up with anything nice to say? Is it true top NBC News staff hated her even more after Russert died?
• How does Arianna run the Huffington Post? What's it like to work there? It's hardly surprising or scandalous that Huffington can be an "erratic... high-strung boss" or that she has lost 15+ employees, as reported in the profile. Sample quote: "One of the frustrating things was that she had absolutely no compunctions about saying, ‘Hey, do this,’ and then saying, ‘Why did you do that? I never asked you to do that.’"
• The New Yorker might start with HuffPo's political message discipline. Huffington has spiked work that is not "congruent with HuffPost's editorial position against the media's penchant for viewing everything through a left/right prism," a convoluted position she formulated after one of her columns was used against Barack Obama.
• Which raises the question: Was HuffPo biased toward Obama? After the site reported that Obama said "bitter" working-class Americans "cling to guns or religion," HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer, who himself said to be unhappy about the story, rushed to talk with angry Obama campaign operatives. That would be the same Lerer who convened a fundraiser for Obama at his apartment the year prior, when he was still CEO of Huffington Post. It's worth at least asking whether the Clinton campaign's accusation that the site was a "conveyor belt" for pro-Obama propaganda was more than mere campaign flackery.
• Also, why did HuffPo delay covering the latest scandal stories on Democratic politician John Edwards, despite having broken some of the earliest ones?
• If the HuffPo has been called an "internet newspaper," as the New Yorker reminds us, Collins would have been well-served to take a look at how much it spends on actual reporting. Mayhill Fowler, arguably its brightest star at the moment, paid her own expenses and received no salary. Huffington herself said many staff left because they "wanted to be writers.... the jobs are administrative."

To fit in some of these topics, the New Yorker might have had to cut out the bits about Huffington's "considerable intelligence," her "seductive" charm and how she likes hiking, "yoga, meditation and prayer." But at least the magazine would have broken some significant new ground.

UPDATE: The Huffington Post itself writes of the profile, "readers don't get much insight into how [Huffington] has actually pulled off this impressively successful website and gained a distinctly new status amid the bloody competition of the Internet."

To an im-

portant personage Russert asked one

or two faintly impertinent questions,

usually about a subject of little or

no concern to anybody outside the

rope lines around official Washing-

ton; sometimes he discovered a con-

tradiction between a recently issued

press release and one that was dis-

tributed by the same politician

some months or years previously.

No matter with which spoon Rus-

sert stirred the butter, the reply was

of no interest to him, not worth his

notice or further comment. He had

sprinkled his trademark salt, his

work was done. The important per-

sonage was free to choose from a

menu offering three forms of re-

sponse—silence, spin, rancid lie. If

silence, Russert moved on to anoth-

er topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if

rancid lie, he swallowed it.

Worse, even, than Lapham's words is the overenthusiastic praise he presents from Russert's establishment friends.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State: "As a public official, it was really, first of all, a treat to get on the show."

Cheney aide Mary Matalin: "He never treated [politicians] with the cynicism that attends some of these interviews. So they had a place to be loved."

Sam Donaldson, ABC: "He [Russert] understood as well as anyone, maybe better than

almost anyone, that the reason political reporters are there is not to speak truth to power... but to make those who say we have the truth — politicians — explain it."

It's easy to fall in love with Lapham's alternate view:

Long ago in the days before

journalists became celebrities, their

enterprise was reviled and poorly

paid, and it was understood by work-

ing newspapermen that the presence

of more than two people at their fu-

neral could be taken as a sign that

they had disgraced the profession.

Halfway through his stint at the 6 p.m. hour on MSNBC, Mr. Gregory’s numbers are solid but not remarkable. For the second quarter of 2008 (from late March to late June), Race for the White House averaged roughly 526,000 total viewers and 161,000 in the 25-54 demographic—roughly twice the audience that Tucker Carlson averaged during the second quarter of 2007.

Twice Tucker is a form of damnation by faint praise.

...over the past several months, the show has rarely made news.

The Observer said it doesn't help that Gregory's show relies on the network's own political contributors as talking heads instead of on actual newsmakers.

This results in a pogram so unmemorable that even NBC's Tom Brokaw screwed up its name, calling it Road To The White House, when ending an episode of Meet The Press. Brokaw also indicated the other NBCer on Meet The Press that morning, political director Chuck Todd, would be making frequent appearances "in the weeks to come" — a sign that Todd, also rumored to be in the running for Russert's job, was well ahead of Gregory.

Another of Gregory's competitors for Meet The Press, former far-right congressman Joe Scarborough, has received laudatory coverage in the Times and New York magazine lately for his MSNBC show Morning Joe, a far cry from the way the Observer is treating Gregory.

This all goes to show that sometimes being a hard-working, aggressive reporter is not always enough to advance in TV news. But don't count Gregory out yet — if this 2006 Tonight Show clip of Gregory imitating George W. Bush is any indication, the correspondent has a wide range of untapped skills.

[Observer]

“Andrea Mitchell, myself, all of us in the Washington bureau—Morning Joe has become a staple for us,” Russert told me...

Russert had chuckled when I brought up the recent partisan critiques of NBC News. “That’s nothing new,” he said. Besides, with someone like Scarborough, “it’s not as if people are trying to present him as a news anchor. He’s not. But even though he’s a conservative Republican, he’s not afraid to criticize his own party. And I think people find that refreshing.”

Then there's this from Time editor Mark Halperin:

“I was totally skeptical, and now I’m totally won over,” says Time editor-at-large Mark Halperin, a political analyst at ABC News. “I was a huge fan of Imus, but Joe has taken that real estate and turned it into something—and I say this without hyperbole—revolutionary. There’s no other show that does what they do. They’ve really found a new form.”

And from former NBC evening news anchor Tom Brokaw:

Tom Brokaw summed up the consensus opinion when, a week or so later, he poked his head into Griffin’s office and said, “Scarborough. Who knew?”

So there have been two basically glowing profiles for Scarborough in as many months. Perhaps his shot at helming Meet The Press is not as weak as it initially appeared, assuming he even wants the job.

[New York]

When I stepped up to admissions desk the nurse asked why I was there. “Mild chest pains,” I said. “How old?” she asked. “Fifty,” I replied.

She nonchalantly turned to the orderly and said, “Hey, Lenny, we got another one.” I guess many men, stunned by Mr. Russert’s sudden death, were doing just the same thing I was.

OK, OK, sure, there are going to be a number of these men tying up hospital emergency rooms with false alarms. And Russert didn't exactly intend to sacrifice himself as some kind of hero to coronary health awareness. But it's nice to see this greater good emerging from the media's somewhat insidery coverage of Russert's death and memorial.

[Times]