That's So 1990s

Of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell appearance tonight on O’Reilly, (aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan), Mark Finkelstein writes:

Mitchell on Chris Matthews: “I don’t think he’s a liberal thinker.”

And later: “I don’t feel there is bias in what we do at NBC News. And I don’t think there’s bias in CBS or ABC.”

With due respect to Mitchell, whose scrappiness I admire, if someone won’t admit that Chris Matthews is liberal, why should we believe her when she tells us it’s raining?

Somebody needs to update Andrea’s playbook. Mitchell’s claims of universal objectivity actually harken back to a much older era–pre-Fox, pre-Internet, and, especially, pre-Blogosphere. Andrea, it’s OK to admit your biases these days. Since 9/11, everybody else already has! (To be fair though, they often wait until retirement or close to it. Contrast Mitchell’s defensiveness with the recent remarks of Thomas Edsall, formerly of The Washington Post. Or Bill Clinton’s.)

(Video here.)

Update: Mitchell’s obfuscations to O’Reilly are virtually identical in style to those that Leslie Stahl gave to Fox’s Cal Thomas in 2003, one year before Dan hit the fan at CBS.