I never met Mr. Russert, though we worked at NBC at roughly the same time, he in Washington and I in New York. I knew him only by reputation and always found him to be a solid, well-informed, hardworking and effective Washington Bureau Chief and Meet The Press moderator. His achievements and successes are well known. He was very good at what he did and he seemed to take great pleasure in his work, always with that smile, that twinkle in his eye. He was beloved among his colleagues and co-workers. His death is a tremendous blow to NBC in both professional and personal terms, which begins to explain what unfolded there, in the hours and days that followed.

The coverage took a familiar and predictable track. Total shock led to saturation reporting which evolved into elaborate tributes, glowing eulogies and memorials, followed by considerable speculation about who should, or could, replace Mr. Russert, until, inevitably, a few isolated voices gingerly began to say things like, “Enough already!” or “Isn't there any real news going on today??” They meant no disrespect. They were trying to point out, insensitively perhaps, that the media, especially NBC, had perhaps taken advantage of their access to the public airwaves by over-covering one of their own, creating the perception that they were pushing legitimate news off to the side, to the detriment of the viewers. This opinion, I suspect, may have added to the anguish felt by those who knew and admired Mr. Russert and were still grieving for him.

Another, less publicized element of the story is the fact that NBC didn't report it right away. The network waited about an hour, until it was certain that all members of Russert's family had been notified. NBC also asked other media organizations to wait, and they complied (Ironically, one didn't. One of NBC's Web vendors assumed the news had already become public, so an employee there updated Russert's bio on Wikipedia even before Tom Brokaw went on the air with the announcement. The employee was disciplined).

So far I haven't seen or read any criticism of the decision to sit on the story, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does materialize. Barring bona fide concerns of national security or a massive lawsuit, newspeople don't like to hold back information and we don't like it when colleagues do it, either.

So we have two questions to consider:

1. Was NBC wrong to hold the story, even for that short time?

2. Once the story did come out, was the coverage over-the-top?

The answer to both questions is yes.

But that's not the whole answer.

The rest of the answer is, don't worry about it.

A few years ago, two young desk assistants where I work were killed in a small plane crash. Their deaths hit us very hard. I still remember how dark and quiet our newsroom got when we heard the news, just a few moments after we'd gone off the air with our 10pm show. People cried. Some of us just stood there. We couldn't move. We stayed that way for quite a long while. The next morning we began to report the story... just a small plane crash, carrying some young people most of our viewers had never heard of. But those kids were our family. We made it our lead story, not just that day, but day after day, until all the funerals were over. We pushed bigger stories aside. We spent far more time on this personal tragedy of ours than we would normally devote to anything similar where the people involved are not known to us. Make no mistake, we knew what we were doing, and we understood that maybe some viewers might wonder about it. We didn't care. There would be plenty of time later to go back to “normal” news coverage, but right now, we didn't feel very normal, and the viewers were just going to have to forgive us.

The people at NBC (and their colleagues throughout the news community) were being human. They'd been hit hard, abruptly, unexpectedly, with the worst possible news. A great friend was snatched away, right in front of them. When that happens to you, it hurts, and you do what you have to do, to deal with the hurt. You're thinking about people, family, feelings... not “Is this the proper thing to do, journalistically speaking?”

Of course NBC held the story until the family was told. It was the human thing to do, to spare loved ones even more pain. And of course they poured their emotions into hour after hour of coverage. That's how grieving people express their grief.

We forget sometimes that news organizations are made up of people with feelings. Maybe that's because we're so good at detaching ourselves from tragic events in order to report them clearly and fairly. So naturally we get a few crooked glances when the tragedy happens to us, our human side asserts itself, and detached objectivity dissolves away. Fine. Let the critics point it out, let them say, “Aha!” a few times. No big deal. It's temporary. Our newsroom eventually returned to normal after we lost our two young friends, and NBC quickly pulled itself together as well.

To tell you the truth, it was enlightening to watch NBC during those sad days. We were privileged to see a different, very vulnerable side of some of the industry's top professionals. It was comforting, in a way, to see that some things matter more than news, and we're really all the same when it comes to the truly important things.

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