Private White House Dinners: Just Say No

Interesting in terms of last week's discussion. Does Andrea Mitchell's reporting conflict with her marriage to Alan Greenspan? Mitchell claims to still be an outsider, but I can't help wondering if her objectivity is inherently skewed?


[I posted the entire article here because I can't link to Washington Post.com without forking over my first born...]


---
Covering Herself
By Jonathan Yardley
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; C02

TALKING BACK

. . . to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels

By Andrea Mitchell

Viking. 414 pp. $25.95

Like a great many prominent journalists -- certainly in Washington,
but no less so in other centers of power, wealth and celebrity --
Andrea Mitchell of NBC News wants to have it both ways. On the one
hand, she wants to be the prototypical, hard-nosed, gumshoe reporter
whose specialty is " 'talking back' to presidents and dictators," but
on the other, she wants to be part of the parade, on first-name terms
with the powerful, wealthy and famous, invited to their dinner parties
and salons, courted and cosseted by them. Thus at the end of this
memoir she describes prowling "the VIP section" at the 2005
inauguration of President Bush, which she attended with her husband,
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve:

"In a prominent seat, next to the CIA director, was Alan. . . . As his
wife, I could have sat with him among the official guests instead of
covering the event as a reporter. But for me, this was a dream
assignment: we had a live broadcast, hundreds of prominent politicians
with no way out, and no one stopping me from snagging interviews. . .
. Knowing me as he does, Alan understood that it wasn't even a close
call. But looking across the way at him, I was struck by how different
our roles were on days such as this: he was inside, looking out, while
I was outside, looking in."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Mitchell may have
arrived in Washington in 1976 as an ambitious outsider -- hired away
from a Philadelphia television station by the local CBS affiliate,
WTOP, "to cover the corruption trial of the governor of Maryland,
Marvin Mandel" -- she became an echt Washington insider as she moved
to NBC, covered the White House, Congress and other highly visible
beats, married Greenspan, and became something of a celebrity in her
own right, "a player." By virtue of her prominence as a journalist and
her husband's prominence in the government, she is strictly A-list.

In this, as mentioned above, she is scarcely alone, but the ways in
which she dances around the issue shed some light on the contorted
lines of reasoning that permit people in her position to claim
journalistic independence -- journalists, she says she learned at an
early age, "were supposed to be adversaries of those in power, wardens
against abuses and conflicts of interest" -- yet to sup at the tables
of the mighty. She's come a long way from the Bronx and New Rochelle,
and though she says that "I still love the chase for news," she does
her chasing in an environment to which most journalists are denied
admission.

Say it for her, though, that what she does, she does very well. She's
smart, energetic, determined and fast on her feet: a real terrier.
She's in a business that now deals almost entirely in sound bites, but
she has higher standards than many people in that business. She's
dismayed that "in a nation of people increasingly informed by talk
show rant on the right and the left, facts are incinerated in a blaze
of rumor and accusation," that "lost in the haze of left- and
right-wing polemics is real journalism." As television journalism
becomes ever more enchanted by flash and dazzle, she clings to
old-fashioned notions of what journalists should do, and she's right.

She's considerably less right in her apparent conviction that a
blow-by-blow account of three decades on the front line of television
journalism is, in and of itself, an interesting story. It isn't.
Mechanically marching through one story after another, "Talking Back"
quickly boils down to an endless "and then I covered . . ." plod that
has no narrative line. Her prose is clean enough, if susceptible to
cliches -- "the grizzled veterans of the press room," "I hammered
Gergen with questions," "a heartbeat away from the Oval Office" -- and
she occasionally reveals a genuine grasp of complex national and
international issues, but she's so intent on leaping from one hot
story to the next that she leaves no doubt that it's the chase, rather
than what's found at the end of it, that really matters to her.

Thus, for example, there is her exceedingly weird obsession with being
the person to "break" the story of a presidential nominee's choice for
his running mate. Nothing could more plainly illustrate the
inside-the-Beltway mentality to which she's fallen victim. She
breathlessly recounts the digging that led to her disclosure in 1988
"that George Bush had selected Dan Quayle to be his running mate" --
"My role in breaking the Quayle story helped people within the network
realize I could be a player" -- and her pursuit of 2004's "next big
story, John Kerry's choice of a running mate." Though she acknowledges
that "to this world outside television news, it may seem like a silly
business" -- amen to that -- she insists that "we all became
journalists because we love to chase stories, and this was a story
worth chasing."

I beg to differ. A running mate probably hasn't changed an election's
outcome since at least 1960; being five minutes ahead of everyone else
on a "scoop" that eventually will be little more than a press release
isn't news at all. It was news of the first order on Nov. 22, 1963,
when Merriman Smith of UPI grabbed the telephone in the press car and
beat everyone else to the terrible story in Dallas, but chasing around
after the vice-presidential nominee is essentially child's play.
Mitchell acknowledges as much when she says that "the dirty little
secret of journalism is that it's fun, like being hooked on detective
novels," but she doesn't really seem to understand just how silly this
kind of non-story actually is.

Nor does she seem to understand the compromised position in which she
is placed by her dual roles as journalistic celebrity and A-list
socialite. She acknowledges that when Colin Powell returned to the
government in 2001 as secretary of state, it would be "a difficult
balancing act" covering someone whom she "considered a friend" --
Powell and his wife "had both been guests at our wedding" -- but this
marginal awareness of the delicacy of her position doesn't keep her
from, say, attending a 1991 dinner given by George H.W. Bush in honor
of Margaret Thatcher, "upstairs in the White House residence, more
private and special than even a state dinner in the downstairs
official rooms." It was, she says, "my first time upstairs in the
Yellow Room" and continues:

"I enjoyed being a fly on the wall at a private dinner in the White
House; at the same time, I felt that the 'designated shouter' from the
press corps was a little out-of-place upstairs, sitting with officials
whom I covered. I knew I could neither ask questions, nor quote
anything that was said to me. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling that
I might be gaining unusual access, but losing some independence."

Mitchell isn't alone in this, and the problem certainly isn't limited
to broadcast journalists. The spectacle of journalists from all media
slurping up to politicos and other "assorted scoundrels" at events
such as the annual dinners of the Gridiron Club and the White House
Correspondents' Association is repellent in the extreme. Yes,
journalists are human, as vulnerable to flattery and courtship as
anyone else -- perhaps all the more so since our egos tend to be a
good deal larger than our talents -- but the solution to the problem
is very easy: Just say no.