Which is troubling. Mitchell may be making a fair historical comparison to add context to the current crisis; but the fact that it’s a comparison that would also partially absolve her husband from guilt in that crisis means that it’s probably a point another reporter should be making. While the shades of populism in Mitchell’s concern for blame assignment may be legitimate, they could just as easily be the symptoms of a wife wanting to protect her husband’s reputation, now and for the future. It’s one thing for Mitchell to report the facts of the credit crisis, but venturing into commentary is a precarious trek. So is reporting on the Fed itself, as Mitchell did last Monday:

I’m Andrea Mitchell, live in Washington today. The Federal Reserve has agreed to lend one of the world’s largest insurers, AIG, $85 billion to stave off financial crisis in exchange for a major stake in the company. Let’s get right to CNBC’s David Faber, who’s been reporting this all night and all day. David, the Fed said just two days ago they would not be in the bailout business. Now they are taking over, practically, this business by converting these shares and having such a big stake in AIG. What changed?

A fair question, in every sense. But when Mitchell asks another reporter about the Fed—and, really, about anything related to the economic crisis—it’s not so much a question of fairness as it is one of accuracy. While Mitchell may be able to be balanced and sober in her own assessments of the crisis, or in her ability to ask good questions about it, she’s not the only player in her reporting. She has sources and interviewees. And it’s debatable whether those sources and interviewees would be similarly able to answer Mitchell’s questions fully, given the ties of the person who’s asking them.

NBC News doesn’t share that doubt. As Allison Gollust, NBC News’s Senior Vice President for Communications, told me via e-mail:

We make decisions about Andrea’s reporting on the current financial crisis on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. There are countless aspects of the story that present absolutely no potential for conflict whatsoever. In cases where we feel the focus of a given storyline may present a problem, we assign those stories to another correspondent. We are 100 percent comfortable with all of her reporting thus far.

Still, though. I worry that, to the extent that TV segment interviewees are sources, and to the extent that they provide useful information and analysis, rather than just, you know, “good TV,” an interview with Mitchell might constrain their honesty. You wouldn’t want Laura Bush asking you about the federal government’s reaction to Katrina. You wouldn’t Maria Malan interviewing you about apartheid. And so on. Those interviews would be awkward, but, more to the point, they would be unproductive. They’d yield, at most, partial truths. It’d be naive to think that an interview with Mitchell would be any different.

In reporting on the financial crisis, journalists need to help viewers and readers and listeners fully understand what we’re facing right now. (And to fully understand what, exactly, our tax money will be paying to bail out, assuming that the Paulson plan passes.) “What went wrong?” should be a standard question Mitchell and other journalists are asking right now. When one potential answer to that question is “Alan Greenspan,” there’s a conflict. A big one.

Mitchell—who’s recently been doing the work of a national political reporter, though her official title at NBC News is Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent—has been, like a select smattering of NBC’s on-air talent, pretty much omnipresent during the campaign season. As MSNBC has pushed to make itself worthy of its self-supplied tagline (“MSNBC: The Place for Politics”), it has put its most respected personalities—Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, Chuck Todd, and Mitchell—on the air as often as possible. Mitchell regularly guests on Morning Joe and on the evening juggernaut that is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. She anchors the 1 p.m. hour of MSNBC Live (Mika Brzezinski joked on today’s Morning Joe that that hour should be called, simply, Andrea). She’s been a correspondent and commentator during the network’s live evening coverage of political events: primary nights, the conventions, etc. On MSNBC, Mitchell is everywhere.

But maybe she should be a little less everywhere while the financial crisis is at its height. Maybe MSNBC should consider whether its viewers are served by an anchor and reporter who is, in so many ways, so close to the story she’s covering. That isn’t to say that Mitchell should be simply taken off the air right now. That would be a loss to MSNBC and to its views; Mitchell is not only one of the best reporters NBC News has, but also a gravitas-giving presence on a cable network that is desperately seeking, among other things, gravity. But it is to say that, when it comes to covering the financial crisis, the expanse of Mitchell’s space in “The Place for Politics” is worth questioning. Particularly since whatever space she occupies must also accommodate her elephant.

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