Tim Russert on AllMovie

One of television's key pundits during the 1990s and 2000s, Tim Russert entered broadcast journalism from the political arena, where he held sway as press secretary to multi-term New York governor Mario Cuomo and chief of staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan, also of New York State. Russert shifted careers in 1984 by joining NBC News as a regular correspondent, and broke new ground in the venue of American television by featuring one of the first-ever network broadcast appearances of the Pope (filmed live from Vatican City in the mid-'80s), and by emceeing week-long broadcasts from international locations including China and Oceania. Russert is perhaps best known, however, for his 17-year tenure (1991-2008) emceeing the said network's Sunday-morning discussion program Meet the Press, in which he interviewed political movers and shakers with an unusual degree of bluntness and directness. Russert died from a heart attack in 2008, at the age of 58.