Media Mix-It-Up At State Department

It can't be said often enough: Don't mess with Andrea Mitchell.

Last Monday afternoon, the State Department's public affairs shop e-mailed beat reporters that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had agreed to appear that very night on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News Channel show, "On the Record."

Mitchell went ballistic.

"This is OUTRAGEOUS," NBC's foreign policy correspondent scorched the State Department flacks in an e-mail. "He [Armitage] can't answer telephone calls or REPEATED requests for backgrounders or an on-camera interview from the correspondent representing the most widely watched NETWORK newscast . . . and he's doing a FOX talk show that has no relationship to foreign policy?"

Mitchell vented: "I don't get it but it is very upsetting. It also defies any understanding of the difference between the NBC Nightly News, TODAY program, CNBC and MSNBC PLUS the nation's biggest Web site. Is the administration that desperate to appeal to a niche audience? If I sound upset, it's because I am."

Mitchell's e-mail was widely circulated to an appreciative audience and eventually came to us. State Department spokesman Phillip Reeker defended Armitage's level of accessibility. "He is well represented across the spectrum of this nation's and the world's electronic media." But Reeker declined to discuss Mitchell's complaints. "That," he said cheerfully, "would betray my relationship with Andrea Mitchell."

Mitchell, meanwhile, said: "I'm never going to apologize for aggressively trying to get the deputy secretary of state to come on NBC, especially since we have the biggest audience and do such extensive reporting on foreign policy."

Van Susteren, for her part, told us: "I don't know what she means by 'niche' programming. At Fox, we covered the war in Iraq wall to wall. I really think she is tipping her hat to me because I beat her out. If she would like, I would be more than happy to give Andrea Mitchell an interview on foreign policy."

THIS JUST IN...

• Fox News star Bill O'Reilly, the target of a book-length hatchet job scheduled for fall release by a tiny Oregon publisher, is lucky in his enemies. O'Reilly was apparently so worried about Billy Valentine's pending attack that lawyers for Fox News have been flaming the author with threatening e-mails. "Should you make (or print) any public statements impugning the integrity or honesty of Mr. O'Reilly . . . we will take immediate and swift legal action against you. . . . Proceed at your own peril," Fox News attorney Dianne Brandi warned after the author contacted O'Reilly's old Catholic high school on Long Island and grilled Brother Richard Hartz, a school fundraiser, about the television star's donations. Weirdly, Brandi's e-mail is addressed not to Valentine but to "Jim Wilkinson," and an e-mail from Steven W. Gold, another O'Reilly attorney, is addressed to "Fred Wilkinson." Turns out that O'Reilly's antagonist has been using a fictitious name; "Billy Valentine" is a pseudonym. After we probed him repeatedly about these contradictions, the author admitted: "My given name is Art Wilkinson. . . . [I] completely went the wrong way about this." What's-his-name said he was using a bogus moniker not to jeopardize any possible future television or movie deals with Fox. Go figure.

• Don't ask, don't tell: Friday's item on White House anger at ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman over his report of plummeting U.S. troop morale in Iraq has made a lot of noise -- especially the claim that a White House communications operative alerted cybergossip Matt Drudge to the fact that Kofman is gay and, even worse, Canadian. Under questioning in Dallas, where President Bush had arrived for a fundraiser Friday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan tried to be nonchalant, indicating that he wasn't planning an investigation of the incident. "I just can't imagine anyone on my staff would do anything like that," he said. "If they did, they wouldn't be on my staff." McClellan added he had not specifically instructed his staff to avoid such risky activity. "That's not the way we operate -- that's not my style."

The Empire Strikes Back

• The folks at the American Enterprise Institute -- that bastion of Washington power-networking and neoconservative theorizing -- apparently don't take kindly to the whimsical ways of youth.

A group calling itself the Shirts Off Coalition (because President Bush "is paying for his war by taking the shirts off our backs") was staging protests last week outside AEI's downtown headquarters. So on Thursday, when Shirts Off tried to infiltrate a debate about whether the United States is an empire, security personnel barred some of them, interrogated others and ejected a couple from the audience after calling the cops. And when toilets in the 12th-floor men's room suddenly clogged and overflowed, drenching the hallway carpets, guerrilla plumbing was suspected.

"AEI is always interested in featuring different points of view," spokeswoman Veronique Rodman explained. "However, we don't want our conferences disrupted by people looking to do publicity stunts."

In the 300-person audience were neocon gurus Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb and their pundit son, Bill, and journalist David McGlinchey. "Two attendees were preemptively thrown out by AEI proctors and an armed policeman," McGlinchey recounted. "Proctors then sifted through the audience, seemingly questioning everyone who looked under 30 or was not wearing a suit. When they got to me, I asked what criteria they were using. . . . The proctor said, 'If you cause any trouble, there are police waiting outside.' "

The debate featured visiting Oxford historian Niall Ferguson and Carnegie Endowment for Peace scholar Robert Kagan. Yes, the United States is an empire, and that's a good thing, Ferguson argued. No, it's not an empire, but it's very powerful, and that's a good thing, Kagan rejoined. But for Shirts Off Coalition leader Brendan Hoffman, 23, the debate was far too narrow. "There was nobody representing the side of peace," he told us. As for the toilets, "I don't know anything about that," he said. "I personally did not visit the men's room."