MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, and local NBC affiliates across the country are uniformly referring to the Washington Free Beacon as an “anti-Clinton website,” without even mentioning the site’s name.
The description came after the publication’s Alana Goodman wrote a story Monday called “The Hillary Papers,” a window of sorts into Hillary Clinton‘s thinking from her now-deceased best friend.The story was heavily hyped on Drudge before it even ran. Calling the Free Beacon an “anti-Clinton website” is odd treatment for a story that could just as easily landed in The New York Times, New York Magazine or elsewhere.
Free Beacon‘s founder Michael Goldfarb told The Mirror, “The piece wasn’t anti-Clinton, and our website isn’t anti-Clinton, but occasionally the facts are anti-Clinton–and when they are we report them. In this case, some of the documents showed Hillary as ruthless and calculating and vindictive, others showed her in quite a sympathetic light. It’s a shame that Mitchell couldn’t be more graceful in crediting our reporter Alana Goodman for her impressive work, but given her advanced age and deep partisanship–we forgive her for it. You don’t get angry at your grandmother when she says something rude and uninformed, you have to be patient and understanding.”
Mitchell’s husband, Alan Greenspan, is an American economist who was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006. His political position has elicited numerous conflict of interest charges for Mitchell in her role as a journalist covering the administration.
The Free Beacon story is an archive of what Hillary Clinton’s closest friend thought about the former first lady. It dates back to 1992. The grand conclusion is that she’s “strong, ambitious and ruthless” — ruthless being the word that offends. The close friend is Diane Blair, a political science professor whom Hillary Clinton thought of as her “closest friend” before she died in 2000. According to Goodman’s story, “the archive includes correspondence, diaries, interviews, strategy memos, and contemporaneous accounts of conversations with the Clintons ranging from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium.”
The Hillary Papers paint Hillary Clinton as a Gov. Chris Christie-type character who seeks revenge on her adversaries. She calls Monica Lewinksy, the White House intern with whom her husband had sexual relations, a “narcissistic loony tune.” This is Blair quoting Hillary on her thoughts on Lewinksy. Clinton blamed the fooling around, in part, on her own “failures as a wife.”
We sought comment from NBC and MSNBC PR on the matter. Some NBC journalists declined to comment.