He was as dull and grey as Meet the Press on Black and White TV

David Broder died yesterday. To quote Dorothy Parker, "How could they tell."

He was a leftover from the Lawrence Spivack days of Black and White TV on 'Meet the Press.' He was like their own Dorothy Kilgallen. When they both spoke, it sounded like a fly buzzing in the room and had about the same impact, irritating, but not of importance. He made you not interested in meeting the press. He was an obvious liberal of old TV, never in outright expressed opinion, but in the framing of the opinion of others. During the Clinton Impeachment and Senate Trial he remained so noncommittal he may as well have been a mute. He finally made a luke warm condemnation of Clinton after it was all over. That was the way he wrote and contributed on TV, when it was safe and with a lean to the left, just old and grey.

Political Scene - Washington Times

David Broder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post political columnist whose even-handed treatment of Democrats and Republicans set him apart from the ideological warriors on the nation’s Op-Ed pages, died Wednesday. He was 81.

Mr. Broder, an Illinois native, was familiar to television viewers as a frequent panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Program. He appeared on the program more than 400 times, far more than any other journalist in the show’s history.To newspaper readers, he was one of the nation’s most prominent syndicated columnists. A September 2007 study by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters found that Mr. Broder was second among columnists only to George Will in the combined circulation of newspapers in which his column appeared.

He was the only one of the top five that the group did not label as either conservative or liberal. (That was because he never said much of anything. Too bad, but that seems to be the consensus.).