Greg Mitchell (born 1947) is the author of twelve books and currently blogs on the media and politics, and of late especially on WikiLeaks and Occupy Wall Street, for The Nation. He was the editor of Editor & Publisher (E&P), which covers the news and newspaper industry, from 2002 to the end of 2009.
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Greg Mitchell's latest book, published in November 2011, is "40 Days that Shook the World: From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere." His previous book, published in August 2011, was "Atomic Cover-Up," exploring the suppression of film footage from Hiroshima shot by two U.S. soldiers. Other recent books are "The Age of WikiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond)" and "Bradley Manning."
Mitchell currently writes a daily media blog for The Nation. His previous book, published in January 2009, was "Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008" (Sinclair Books). Before that, in March 2008, appeared his book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed in Iraq (Union Square Press). It includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by war reporter Joseph L. Galloway. His 1992 book for Random House, "The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics," which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, was recently published in its first e-book edition.
Mitchell is married to writer Barbara Bedway, and they live in Nyack, New York. The couple has a son, Andy, now a filmmaker, about whom he has written regarding their experiences together in Little League baseball in the memoir Joy in Mudville.[1][2] Mitchell has a daughter, Jeni, from a previous marriage, who lives in London.
His influential blog, launched at The Nation in April 2010, is updated several times a day at the magazine's web site. He also blogs regularly for Huffington Post, among other sites and has a popular Twitter feed @GregMitch.
Mitchell was editor of Nuclear Times magazine from 1982 to 1986 and has written widely about the atomic bombings for dozens of magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and the Washington Post.
Mitchell is co-author of a book with Robert Jay Lifton on the perceptions in the United States of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. In an interview,[3] he discussed the long-censored stories of Chicago Tribune correspondent George Weller, the first Western news reporter to reach Nagasaki after the atomic bombing.
He wrote a second book with Lifton about capital punishment called Who Owns Death?
Mitchell has written a pair of acclaimed books about famous California political campaigns. One was The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair's race for governor in 1934 and the birth of media-driven elections. It was made into a PBS documentary for "The Great Depression" series and was produced in the theater as a musical. His book, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon Vs Helen Gahagan Douglas--Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 homes in on an era in California politics as it impacted national politics.
In the 1970s, Mitchell was senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy! magazine where he is credited with writing (with Crawdaddy editor Peter Knobler) the first magazine article about Bruce Springsteen.
Mitchell revealed what he called his own Jayson Blair moment in his E&P column in 2003. At age 21 and while working as a summer intern, Mitchell confessed to making up some quotes when asked by his city editor at the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) to gather quotes from tourists at Niagara Falls. The point of the column is that both he and other journalists learn from their mistakes.
In an interview on June 28, 2004 with the Echo Chamber Project,[4] Mitchell discussed the duty of news reporters to be "skeptical" and not tilt coverage either to the right or left. He cited coverage of the build-up to the United States war in Iraq as an example of skewed coverage.
He said the tone of coverage by news media "all our coverage on all subjects—is not to be partisan or not to be left or right or anything like that. But we believe in the—what should be the main principle of journalism, besides being accurate and fair, is to be skeptical—to raise questions, to not take what officials say as the gospel truth—unless it's really proven—if there's documents."
Whether covering Washington or a small town, Mitchell said "the journalistic principle is the same: to be skeptical unless there's hard evidence and proof. And you report what someone says—"It's their claim." "It's what they say." "It's what they allege." "It's what they're trying to prove." But you don't present these things as fact if you're not sure they're fact. And what happened with the Iraq coverage was that too often newspapers—and especially television—went with stories that were based on official claims, and in retrospect, were really propaganda. Because in some cases, the officials were well-meaning. Maybe they thought that they had the evidence. But in other cases, they knew their evidence was incredibly shaky—or should have known—and yet went with the evidence claiming it was fact. And the press just, in most cases, accepted it."[4]