Please keep his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.
Kim adds: I just found out myself, and I’m completely shocked. Stunned. How sad. I liked and respected him. One thing that stands out for me is how much he loved his dad, a real salt of the earth kind of guy, about whom he wrote a book. And he loved his son and spoke so highly of him. Here’s more Fox News:
NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert has died, NBC reported Friday.
Russert, host of top-rated Sunday talk show “Meet the Press,” reportedly died of a heart attack. He was 58.
A noticeably shaken Tom Brokaw made the announcement live from New York, saying his colleague collapsed and died early Friday afternoon in the NBC News bureau in Washington.
Brokaw said Russert had just returned from a trip to Italy with his wife, Maureen Orth, and son, Luke, to celebrate Luke’s graduation from Boston College.
“He has been a very familiar face on this network and throughout the world of political journalism as one of the premiere political analysts and journalists of his time,” Brokaw said.
Russert grew up in Buffalo, which Brokaw said Russert had just visited last week to assist in moving his father to a new home.
Update: Hot Air linked to the video (embedded below ) of Tom Brokaw’ as he announced Tim Russert’s death. You can tell how difficult this is for Tom. Several times he sounds like he’s going to lose it. As a viewer, it’s hard to listen to him speak about his friend and not choke up:
Tom mentioned in this clip how often Tim worked to exhaustion on this year’s election. While I was listening to MSNBC a bit earlier, I heard a woman who was being interviewed (it sounded like Barbara Walters, but I can’t be sure) say that, apparently, people thought he was pushing himself too hard.
Update II: Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has a nice tribute to Russert’s work.
Update III: The Anchoress has, as usual, a very thoughtful piece in which she writes this:
We’ll be reading a lot over the next few days about Tim Russert’s impact on the Sunday News Show format, his integrity and hard work, his preparedness, and also about his gregariousness, his humor and humanity. One hopes that his colleagues, out of respect for Russert’s memory and by example of his own ethics, may rededicate themselves to the ideals of journalism that have been subsumed over the past 10 years by the urge to sensationalism, bias and cartoonish bravado, a temptation Russert mostly managed to avoid. He didn’t need to sink to those levels; he was a journalist. He just did his homework and asked the pertinent questions.
Update IV: WebMD has an article about Tim’s death and includes a section by a cardiologist about what may have happened.
