Tim Russert has the "Questions for ..." spot in this Sunday's New York Times magazine. A number of his answers are noted here. But here's the most revealing one:
Q: What do you do on "Meet the Press" if your guests fail to answer your questions?
A: It's so interesting. Do I sometimes feel internally like I should lean over and just shake this person and say, "Please answer the question"? Of course I do. But I do not want to make them the least bit sympathetic. For me to inject myself or become personal, I think would probably make the guest very sympathetic, and I don't want to do that.
Note the inversion here -- aggressive questioning would make his spinning guests seem sympathetic, which he doesn't want, which can only mean that he wants to be the sympathetic figure. Given that some of the most egregious lying about the Iraq war occurred on his show (Cheney: "Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators"), he's sympathetic all right, if you remove the first three letters of that word.
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