David Gregory has been tapped to step in as Tim Russert's replacement on Meet the Press. A quick scan of TV Newser's ratings information suggests that it reliably loses in its time slot against Wolf Blitzer and Brit Hume. Meet the Press is an oddly significant reward for what looks to my untrained eye like a lackluster performance. But it's possible that Gregory is better suited to Sunday mornings than weekday evenings. He made his name as an adversarial member of the White House press corps at a time when his colleagues were being oddly deferential, so he's certainly able to ask an angry or tough question in the face of pompous authority. That's a plus. But Gregory's hostility has, in general, been curiously hollow. His outbursts often seemed more procedural than anything else. He would get indignant over the White House's poor treatment of the press, but his actual coverage didn't betray much anger over their substantive assault on the country. And his response to Scott McClellan's charge that the press was weak and easily manipulated in the run-up to the Iraq War was frankly bizarre:I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that...I think there‘s a lot of critics—and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one—who thinks that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, this is bogus, and you‘re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn‘t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It‘s not our role.I hope he doesn't have a similarly passive view of Meet the Press. Additionally, Gregory is a straight political reporter. He's been a political reporter his whole life. By contrast, Tim Russert served as chief of staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. George Stephanopoulos was chief of staff to Dick Gephardt, and a key adviser to Bill Clinton. Both men, in other words, had a background in the substance of governance rather than simply the coverage of politics. Gregory doesn't. That strikes me as a disadvantage, though as far as I know, no one with governing experience was under consideration for the slot.
