A few years ago in my I-Don’t-Care-About-Anything-Other-Than-The-Fact-That-I-Don’t-Have-A-Girlfriend phase in which I blind dated the entire city of Burlington, Vermont, I met a girl once for coffee and Scrabble (I’m not really a coffee drinker, but I would have met up for crystal meth and water-boarding if it meant the chance to meet a girl). In honor of her heritage, we’ll call her French Girl. French Girl and I spent close to 10 hours together that day experiencing the realized wet-dream of a bohemian like myself: smuggling wine into a French movie, gourmet hot chocolate, Scrabble, chess, and participating in a college psych experiment. In retrospect, the date would have been perfect if not for the fact that she chose the end of the date as the proper time to confess how unattractive she found me. But as we said good night and good luck in the dating world, I thought to myself how fortunate I was to have met her, for she was the one who first introduced me to Tim Russert (who, incidentally, she found attractive).
In the last few years, I have spent countless weekend mornings watching Meet the Press as well as numerous primary and/or debate evenings glued to NBC and MSNBC, forever on the edge of my seat, anticipating Russert’s next insightful word. With a media so unabashedly biased that it makes The Onion look sincere, Russert’s point of view was always refreshingly honest. His youthful exuberance captured my attention, his unmistakable intelligence made it easy for me to listen, and his controlled passion showed me that his was the voice of reason.
As a reporter, Russert informed the uninformed viewer by following the most important lesson of storytelling: show, don’t tell. Rather than shout out opinion after opinion in an effort to win the Most Popular YouTube Soundbite of the Day award (an award co-owned by Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly), he stated all points of view equally and left it to the now-informed viewer to form an opinion. He believed that well-informed viewers were in a better position to make a difference in this world than viewers who had spent the last hour being brainwashed by media propaganda.
As an interviewer, there was no one better. Russert simply did not care whether the interviewee was Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, agnostic, religious, pro-life, pro-choice, etc. What mattered was his belief that everyone be held accountable for all opinions and actions, right or wrong. When one side did its best to spin an answer, as happens everyday in politics, Russert would counter with a hard-hitting, yet completely respectful and truthful follow-up question. What resulted, as evidenced by the most recent primary season, was a country full of conservatives applauding Russert’s Obama and Clinton interviews, and liberals doing the same for the McCain ones.
And so it was that my heart broke at the news that Tim Russert died of a heart attack today at the age of 58. He was the kind of fair and balanced that Fox News unfairly claims to be, and he was the living embodiment of one of Edward R. Murrow’s greatest quotes: “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.” His passing leaves a void the likes of which the field of journalism hardly ever sees. He won’t be forgotten and he most certainly won’t be replaced.
Benchly'sword 
I love you, but you missed a bit of punctuation that I think it essential to the piece. Other than that, I think Tim Russert would have enjoyed your eulogy! And I bet French Girl probably hates John Krasinski as well. She obviously has unsophisticated taste!
i keep looking for new posts. you must have something brewing…