Greg Mitchell (b. 1947) is the editor of Editor & Publisher (E&P), which covers the news and newspaper industry. He writes a column called "Pressing Issues" for E&P and is the author of eight books.
Greg Mitchell's latest book, published in January 2009, is "Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008" (Sinclair Books). His previous book was published in March 2008, titled 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.
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. Mitchell has a daughter, Jeni, from a previous marriage.
His influential blog, Media Fix, launched at The Nation in April 2010, is updated several times a day at the magazine's web site. Its "Daybook" feature presents media and politics items and links early in the morning, updated all day and weekends. 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, 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[1] June 28, 2004 with the Echo Chamber Project, 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."[2]
The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's E.P.I.C. Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics by Greg Mitchell (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), ISBN 0-87113-467-5 Winner of the 1993 Goldsmith Book Prize
Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Avon Books, 1996), ISBN 0-380-72764-1 (Diane Pub Co, 1995), (Putnam Pub Group 1995), ISBN 0-399-14072-7 ISBN 0-7881-9992-7
Joy in Mudville: A Little League Memoir by Greg Mitchell (Pocket Books, 2000), (Washington Square Press, 2002), ISBN 0-671-03532-0 ISBN 0-671-03531-2
Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon Vs Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 by Greg Mitchell (Random House Inc, 1998), ISBN 0-679-41621-8
Truth.. and Consequences: 7 Who Would Not Be Silenced by Greg Mitchell (W W Norton & Co Inc, 1987), ISBN 0-934878-08-0
Very Seventies: A Cultural History of the 1970S, from the Pages of Crawdaddy, Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell (editors) (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, April 1, 1995), ISBN 0-684-80069-1 ISBN 0-02-022005-7
Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions by Robert Jay Lifton; Greg Mitchell (William Morrow & Co, November 1, 2000), (Perennial, February 1, 2002), ISBN 0-380-79246-X ISBN 0-380-97498-3
So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed in Iraq, by Greg Mitchell (Union Square Press, March 4, 2008) ISBN 1402756577 ISBN 978-1402756573
