Andrea Mitchell, Ace Detective

Over the years, NBC has featured many fine detectives: Joe Friday, Lt. Columbo, Rockford, Crockett and Tubbs, Mike Logan and Lennie Briscoe.

Alas, they’re all fictional. Back in the real world — or at least the reality that passes as NBC’s news division, Andrea Mitchell isn’t quite as sharp when it comes to deductive reasoning.

In 2007, when asked by Bill O’Reilly about the bias at NBC and its spin-off cable networks, she quickly punted:

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?

And this week, she’s not willing to commit to George Soros’ place on the ideological spectrum:

[youtube GK_3Pperv74]

Of course, she can detect ideology when it emanates from beyond her comfort zone, as this moment from last year indicates:

[The Obama campaign have] been arguing that their electoral map is different, that they can do this with North Carolina and Colorado, and other places where they have won either primaries or caucuses. Other people, I should point out, other Clinton loyalists, but realists, say that that electoral map is a stretch in one regard: There are, you know, Republican governors and Secretaries of State, if you will, Katherine Harris-type election officials in those states. So, even though he may have won primaries or caucuses in those states, he has to go up against the establishment, which would be Republican, and he has to figure out a way to get a fair vote if he’s the nominee in those red states.

Somehow he managed to squeak by.

As the title card for the above clip illustrates, the left wing Talking Points Memo Website understandably focuses on the red meat rhetoric of Sen. Orrin Hatch. But isn’t the real story illustrated in the clip that NBC pays six or seven figures to a television journalist with decades of experience covering politics, but can’t (read: won’t) decipher the worldviews of colleagues she works with daily, or a power political figure such as George Soros?

Related: Tim Blair on “Hard Times”:

Shrinkage at the NYT:

The New York Times newsroom is reeling from today’s announcement that the company plans to cut the staff by 100 …

Most of the people at the Times know the paper needs to be slimmed down, but nobody expected it would come in the middle of October. The newsroom is “stunned.”

Advice to NYT bosses: identify the staffers who were the most surprised by this and fire them first. If they don’t know what’s happening in their own office, what good are they as reporters?

They’d certainly be right at home working for GE.