Say Anything Blog

By Mark Finkelstein

Andrea Mitchell might be a doyenne of the liberal media, but she has her reporter’s pride and principles, both of which have been trampled by the way the Obama campaign has managed the media during the candidate’s current trip to Afghanistan and Iraq.  Mitchell let loose on this evening’s Hardball, speaking of “fake interviews” and indicating we don’t know the truth of the trip because we don’t know what was edited out of the video that’s been released.

[...]

  MITCHELL: Let me just say something about the message management.  He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference while he was on the ground in either Afghanistan or Iraq. What you’re seeing is not reporters brought in.  You’re seeing selected pictures taken by the military, questions by the military, and what some would call fake interviews, because they’re not interviews from a journalist.  So, there’s a real press issue here.  Politically it’s smart as can be.  But we’ve not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before.

[...]
.   MITCHELL: I can’t really say that.  Being a reporter who was not present in any of those situations, I just cannot report on what was edited out, what was, you know, on the sidelines. We don’t know what we are seeing. That’s my issue.

Good on Andrea. Now, will the rest of the MSM press the Obama campaign to release the outtakes from the war zone?

So, we have his Stalin-like purging of old positions from his website as he changes his mind on the issues, and now we have what one distinguished reporter regards as “fake interviews”.  Who is this guy, really?
I think we have no idea of who he really is, and where he really stands on the issues that are important to the American people.  What we are getting is slick packaging, and nothing more.