Ten Questions for Andrea Mitchell

NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell is beginning her book tour. To promote “Talking Back…To Presidents, Dictators and Assorted Scoundrels,” she answers ten questions in this week’s Time Magazine. This is the best one:

You’re friends with everyone from Dick Cheney to Teresa Heinz Kerry and married to a guy who gets called the second most powerful man in the U.S. Doesn’t that compromise your coverage?

“I don’t think so. It is a balancing act that many people in Washington perform. And my husband and I very carefully don’t discuss his work. At times, it can be really frustrating. I’m a reporter. I want to know. Once, he came down to Little Rock to meet with the newly elected [President] Bill Clinton, and I was assigned to cover the transition there. I learned that he was in town from George Stephanopoulos’ briefing.” (Via Romenesko)

> Update:4:12pm: “Her original insistence on a clear separation of work and social life seems progressively undercut by her own account,” Publisher’s Weekly reviews. “She mentions many dinners with dear friends like the Cheneys, and parties with the Bushes, Rice and Rumsfeld, and then wonders why the media got the Iraq WMD question so wrong.”