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A nastily contrariwise way of remembering Tim Russert was published Friday in Canada’s most important newspaper, the Globe and Mail, by one of its best-known columnists, Rick Salutin. Russert was a familiar face on the TV screens of millions of Canadians, but even so he was a foreigner, and Salutin examined him phenomenologically, as Canadian intellectuals like to examine Americans. Russert “had a gotcha style based on confronting his guests with things they had said, but I don’t recall him ever challenging them on basic political issues or values,” Salutin told Canada. But to the “superstars of the news media . . . he was their substitute real person,” their street cred, “a link to the real world, now lost so far below their aerie of vast wealth, limos, blow-dried haircuts. . . . He looked like a news hound [though Salutin said he wasn’t], and acted as if that was his metier, like a fish in water.”
It’s Salutin’s notion of the Internet that made me think twice — his idea of the ‘Net as a sort of frontier where plain truths are spoken, grit is capital, and fancy pants are hooted out of town. Maybe for the moment that’s so, but frontiers get settled, order gets imposed, and pecking orders establish themselves. In a world of blogging equals Ariana Huffington, for one, clearly regards herself already as more equal than others. And she’s announced that she intends to expand the Huffington Post into local news, beginning with a site dedicated to Chicago. She’s on her way to becoming the William Randolph Hearst of the blogosphere.
