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Tim Russert

Influential American television journalist, he anchored NBC's election coverage and hosted Meet the Press

Tim Russert, who has died aged 58 of a heart attack, was arguably the most influential political journalist in America. He hosted the longest-running programme in television history, the Sunday morning political interview show, Meet the Press, during which time it became a rite of passage for American politicians. He was simultaneously Washington bureau chief for the NBC network, presented other interview shows on its cable outlets and fronted its presidential election coverage.

His ascendancy marked the rise of two connected trends in US television's coverage of politics: the rise of the insider and celebrity journalists. Before going into broadcasting, as a young lawyer Russert had worked on the staffs of the New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1976-82) and the state governor Mario Cuomo (1983-84). He said he got his start in investigative journalism during Moynihan's 1982 campaign, when he dug up information that Moynihan's Republican opponent, Bruce Caputo, had made false claims of military service in Vietnam (Caputo was forced to pull out of the race).

He was hired by NBC's Washington bureau in 1984 and, in 1991, became host of Meet the Press. Traditionally, the show's subjects had been questioned by a panel of journalists, and its moderators - only four in its first 37 seasons - came from the panel itself. But a change of format had seen four different hosts in the seven years before Russert started. His immediate success was due to a combination of personal affability and sharp questioning, and he quickly became identified with the programme, and through it, a celebrity. This melding of celebrity journalists and Washington insiders has set - many would say lessened - both the tone and quality of what Americans know about politics in their capital, knowledge they glean mainly from television.

Washington insiders live in a hothouse world of privilege. They marry among themselves; Russert, for example, met his wife - Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth - at the 1976 Democratic party convention. They even holiday together; Russert's $7m summer house on Nantucket Island was close to those of his corporate bosses: NBC's Bob Wright and NBC's parent company, General Electric's Jack Welch.

However, Russert, who was born in Buffalo, New York, always defined himself by his working-class Irish roots. Even at the height of his fame, he would sign off his shows with exhortations to Buffalo's football team, the Bills, or its ice hockey team, the Sabres. His father, Timothy Joseph Russert - known as "Big Russ" - drove both rubbish and newspaper delivery trucks, and instilled a strong work ethic in his son. His childhood memoir Big Russ & Me (2004, written with William Novak) became a bestseller.

He even attributed using his trademark whiteboard, on which he famously wrote "Florida Florida Florida" to explain the key to the 2000 presidential election returns, to searching for explanations his father would understand. As a defining prop, it was only slightly more useful than the "swingometer" once used by Peter Snow on BBC election coverage, but it created a "homespun" image for Russert.

Educated by Jesuits at Canisius high school, Buffalo, and John Carroll University, Ohio, Russert took a law degree at Marshall College, Cleveland.

His interviewing style owed much to this combination of Jesuitical and legal training. When he took over Meet the Press, its original producer, Lawrence Spivak, then 91, advised him to "learn as much as you can about your guests' positions, and then take the other side". Russert's "other side" became a sort of cross-examination, passing over analysis of issues in favour of the legal parsing that might catch guests in contradictions between past statements and present positions. In the case of Hillary Clinton, he got her to disagree with a quote from her husband about "beating a terrorist who knew the location of a bomb" before revealing its source. This "are you lying now or were you lying then?" approach made for good drama, but did not always recognise the fact that political situations, as well as positions, can change quickly. Nor did it always challenge current positions. When the Republican presidential candidate John McCain repeatedly claimed that he supported President George Bush's tax cuts because they had increased government revenue - something easily disproved - Russert instead homed in on McCain's original opposition to the cuts.

Despite his earlier involvement with leading Democratic party figures, Russert showed no party bias on screen, reflecting instead the relatively narrow spectrum of mainstream American politics and the uniformity of assumptions within the Washington network. He remained friendly with figures from the right, such as Rush Limbaugh, who called him "the closest thing there was at any of the networks to an objective journalist". It was Russert who came up with the designation of "red states" and "blue states" to signify areas of Republican or Democratic leanings, which today defines contemporary American politics, with red now meaning conservative Republican.

Russert himself became part of the story when, in 2005, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to US vice-president Dick Cheney, was accused of leaking Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to smear her husband, ambassador Joe Wilson. Libby claimed that he had got the information from Russert. Although Russert refused to testify about any conversations with Libby, he had previously told the FBI he was not the source, and did testify that Plame's identity had never been leaked to him. In 2007, prosecutors attributed Libby's conviction for perjury to Russert's testimony. He was embarrassed when Cheney's press secretary, Cathie Martin, admitted that they often booked the vice-president on Meet the Press because it was their "best format to control the message".

Before his death Russert had been on holiday with his family in Italy, celebrating his son Luke's college graduation. Having returned alone to host his weekly show, he suffered a heart attack while taping voice-over material. He received fulsome praise from Bush, the Clintons, Barack Obama and McCain, who said of an appearance on Meet the Press that he "hadn't had so much fun since my last interrogation at prison camp".

Russert is survived by his wife, his son, who presents a US national radio talk show, his father and three sisters.

· Timothy John Russert, television anchorman and journalist, born May 7 1950; died June 13 2008

· This article was amended on Wednesday June 18 2008. This obituary referred to General Electric's Jack Walsh. That should have been Jack Welch, chairman and CEO at General Electric from 1981 to 2001. This has been corrected.

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