Mrs. Greenspan Elite? No Way!

In today’s Style section, Jonathan Yardley takes NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and the elite journalism community to task for their mixing of business and pleasure. Mitchell’s new memoir “Talking Back . . . to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels” is out now from Viking.

From the opening and closing paragraphs of Yardley’s review:

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…..

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.

In between he gives some kind(er) words about the book and Mitchell, but his disgust with the whole culture (perhaps best personified by some of his own Post colleagues, we might add) colors the whole write-up.

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