Tim Russert was a cog in the political machine

A red-faced, overweight and very valuable piece of commercial property named Tim Russert fell dead at the age of 58 in an NBC soundroom in Washington DC a week ago, unleashing an astounding and excessive flow of homages to his skills and influence.

George and Laura Bush attended the public wake after a private funeral where Barack Obama and John McCain sat next to each other, apparently on the family's instructions. The political and journalistic elites turned out for a televised memorial service at the Kennedy Centre, with Bruce Springsteen sending a video tribute from Europe. In Buffalo, New York, where Russert was born the son of a garbage collector, the flags flew at half-mast.

Britons probably know as little of Russert as Americans do of Jeremy Paxman. Political

journalism is mostly an insular affair, unless turned into a parable, the knights of the fourth estate jousting bravely against the dark forces of despotism. This happened with CBS's Ed Murrow in the 1950s in his confrontations with the witch-hunting Joe McCarthy, also with the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein in the early 1970s.

Russert certainly had the skills, the reputation and the venue - Meet the Press, watched avidly by politicians and journalists every Sunday - to take on those dark forces of despotism, in the shape of Bush and Cheney, who were busy trashing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and enlisting the press in prepping public opinion for the attack on Iraq in 2003.

Yet Russert helped sell the war, the same way he helped sell the notion - contradicted in the polls - that Americans reckoned that defeating al-Qaeda was more important than honouring habeas corpus or prohibitions on torture. Those doubting the tall tales in the New York Times and Washington Post about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction