(Some things make me angry.  Politics is often one of these, and media coverage being a prime mover in our national political discourse, I addressed a letter to Tim Russert this morning as follows.)

Tim:

I like you, you seem like a nice guy and at times are a probing questioner, these being among your several other endearing qualities discernible from my humble station.

However, I no longer retain any respect for your integrity as a journalist following last night's debate, mostly after a key line of questioning that lacked logical coherence and supplied disrespectful and irresponsible innuendo in plenty. In its course, you effectively asked Barack Obama to explain precisely why he wouldn't be a threat to the Jewish community given comments made in his support by one Louis Farrakhan, thereby insinuating that there was such a possibility,. Farrakhan is so tangentially connected to Barack Obama that an attempt to manufacture that connection on national television in such a widely-viewed medium reaches heights of intimation that are hardly matched by the most base, self-serving, and, in many cases, racist of Obama's detractors. And, it reenergizes the rumor mill already started by those same people.

I'm sure this was an attempt to ask Obama a "hard" question. Keith Olbermann, before the debate, allowed you to remind the viewers that you would be asking such questions of Obama, and I was interested to hear what those questions would be. Perhaps you would question again his frequent "present" votes in the Illinois State Senate and whether that reflected his avoidance of sticking his political neck out. For a sexier topic, maybe you would inquire further into the nature of his relationship with the slumlord Rezko. Any number of legitimate concerns might have been addressed to Senator Obama in pointed and potentially revealing ways, but you chose defamation in their stead..

Of course one might argue the benefits of airing this slime before a general election sure to be full of it, and I tend not to strongly disagree with this line of reasoning. However, any honest observer must recognize that the meagerness of correlation between Farrakhan and Obama's words and actions must preclude any extended discussion of it as a serious issue. For starters, the idea that the words of his pastor must necessarily have implications for Obama's own beliefs has been invalidated beyond doubt. So any further stretching of the ties must then also be discredited. Hence, the idea that since Obama wrote a book and titled it after the words of his pastor, a man who respects Louis Farrakhan, who is someone who says that Judaism is a "gutter" religion, then therefore Obama must then necessarily "reject" or "denounce" Farrakhan's words or risk being himself tainted, is a logical disaster. However, the way you continued to probe suggested you almost believed that a reasonable and substantive link could, and maybe should be drawn, and, most despicably, you did it in the a context of a presidential debate that would give the ideas more integrity and force that your persona alone could ever hope to achieve.

I'll close by simply noting that this reaction was shared to its full extent among all of my friends and peers who watched the debate, many of whom were in the same room last night. To us it was precisely the type of easy, ratings-grabbing, faux-journalism we've all come to expect from the news media in all of what can at most be six or eight years since we've all been paying much attention. Most of us are around twenty-four years of age. It has been much wondered upon wherein lay the origin of our collective cynicism, and I can tell you that much of it is from words like yours last night, Tim. I won't hesitate to claim that I'm a liberal and an Obama supporter, but I think that for most of our generation, and across the ideological spectrum, such rhetoric is transparently irresponsible, illogical, and blameworthy, and it turns us off. Thanks to Barack Obama, not you, for providing us renewed faith in the potential of our nation's politics.

Respectfully,
Alex M. White