Late last night, NBC Chiefs Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell stepped into the fray of the riots in Ferguson, Mo. Considering that race is clearly at the forefront of this story, as a unarmed black teen died at the hands of a white officer, it’s not outlandish that she brought it up. But the Washington Examiner called her “outrageously irresponsible.”
Was she?
.@washingtonpost demanding why @WesleyLowery taken in prevented from taking video by #Ferguson police. Detained for reporting while black?
— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) August 14, 2014
The Washington Examiner, which leans conservative in its opinion pages, lashed out at Mitchell this morning, calling her tweet about the black Washington Post reporter “wildly irresponsible trash.” The writer also called on the network to reprimand her.
T. Becket Adams, who previously wrote for Glenn Beck‘s TheBlaze, is a commentary writer for the Examiner. He wrote in his piece of the arrested reporters (one white, one black), “Needless to say, their reported run-in with law enforcement officials raises several questions: Why were they detained? What right did the police have? What justification was there for this incident? Unfortunately, however, Mitchell decided to take an already alarming situation and made it worse by suggesting — with zero evidence — that race might have played a role.”
Adams went on, calling Mitchell’s suggestion “gross, demeaning, dangerous and totally irresponsible,” and “the sort of garbage you’d expect from one of her lesser colleagues, from one of MSNBC’s late night carnival barkers.”
The Mirror reached out to an NBC publicist for comment.