In another gooey interview released on Monday, MSNBC host and NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell hilariously told Politico Magazine columnist and friend Susan Glasser that she was not a Hillary Clinton hack or a liberal journalist because “that isn’t my reputation” and claimed the Clinton campaign press “harass[ed] her...all summer long about the private server.”
The 49-minute fawning podcast was a pure spectacle and conversations no different than what you’d find inside the Democratic National Committee. Espousing a holier than thou aurora and painting a doomsday, totalitarian view of Trump, Glasser swooned over how “Mitchell seems to love it” in taking on Trump.
Concerning President Trump calling her out as a Clinton hack following the Susan Rice interview, Glasser lobbed this softball: “Anybody who knows you had to laugh. You’re usually called the aggressive reporter asking the pesky question. What did you make of this week’s back and forth?”
Mitchell responded by stating how she “was a little stunned” by the factually true label, pathetically claiming “that isn’t my reputation with the Hillary Clinton team, with the Obama White House, with the Bill Clinton White House, with the Ronald Reagan or George Bush White Houses.”
“So I’ve had, I guess, covered seven presidents now and have not been — have not endeared myself to any of them. That’s the job. We are adversarial. I thought I asked the tough questions. You know, I don’t shout at people,” Mitchell added.
Glasser painted Mitchell as a religiously neutral reporter who’s simply followed the story. This claim was simply laughable.
For anyone who reads NewsBusters regularly, Mitchell’s liberal statements make her a daily offender. Whether it's spreading fake news, fretting about (not investigating) the Clinton e-mail scandal, swooning over Ted Kennedy, insulting conservatives, or comparing Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln, she appears as often as Chris Matthews.
Citing the infamous Hillary Clinton-Whitewater press conference as an example of her neutrality, my colleague Tim Graham pointed out that Mitchell admitted she regretted that moment in her book Talking Back:...to Presidents, Dictators, and the Assorted Scoundrels.
To illustrate their cozy relationship, the photo I included for this blog is a photo she included in her book of the two laughing on Clinton’s 1995 Beijing trip.
Here’s a portion of Glasser’s write-up of the podcast:
Mitchell says that after covering every president since Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump is by far the most hostile to the press—and to the truth—she’s ever seen, with a White House staff using the briefing room as a daily disinformation machine and a president and secretary of state outright undermining the ability of reporters to do their job.
“It is totally sui generis. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mitchell says. “I have never seen anything like this where people just flat-out lie. You know, black is white and white is black, and they mislead you. It's really disconcerting to see the podium in the White House briefing room being used to mislead or misdirect or obfuscate.”
And then there’s the matter of Tillerson and his outright refusal to talk to reporters like Mitchell who’ve spent a lifetime on the diplomatic beat – and won’t even be bringing the usual complement of journalists along when he heads to Moscow for a crucial first visit this week amid escalating tensions over Trump’s airstrike on Russia proxy Syria. “There is just an attempt, and it’s successful, to shut down not just me but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, CNN. I mean, we're all just shut out,” Mitchell says. “You should not be flying into Beijing without a press corps. You should not be going to Moscow without the press corps. It's wrong.”
In addition, the duo left their journalistic titles at the door as they chided Trump for not having more minorities and women in his cabinet, took Bill O’Reilly’s swipe at Mitchell as an attack on the First Amendment.
“I’m very surprised that someone on Fox News would be so antagonistic to the First Amendment,” Mitchell whined with a snide tone.
She also denied the reality that the media has become the opposition party to the President by showing how, after eight years, journalism and fact-checking have suddenly reemerged from the wilderness a la Hillary Clinton:
I think we are the Fourth Estate. We’re not the opposition party. We are supposed to be the, you know, eyes and ears for the public on evolving administration policy, whether you’re in the White House or covering the State Department. We’re supposed to explain it to people and bring people in and let them see how their government is working. Is it working in your behalf? Is it not?
As for Glasser, she later expressed befuddlement with Trump’s attacks on the media:
He just seems to be obsessed at always making it about the media and how ironic, right, said this in an interview with the news organization that he labels the failing New York Times. Does it make much harder to cover the Trump administration that he’s determined to turn you and us into the story?
That’s the funny little secret about the liberal media: while most claim that they never want to be a part of the story, they love being the center of attention. Mitchell, lying Brian Williams, and CNN’s Brian Stelter are just a few examples. The media loves to deride President Trump for being self-centered, but it would behoove the media to look at themselves in the mirror.
Whether it’s CNN’s Jeffrey Zucker turning this serious world into a game playing out on live TV or Williams embellishing large portions of his career, Mitchell is no exception.
