Politics & Power Quote by Andrea Mitchell

The line has the clear-eyed modesty of someone describing a first rung on a ladder without romanticizing it. Mitchell isn’t selling the myth of the prodigy; she’s sketching the unglamorous mechanics of entry-level journalism: “rip and read” wire copy, deliver the “leads,” keep the machine moving. The specificity matters. “Rip and read” is industry slang, a tell that she’s speaking from inside the newsroom, not from a memoirist’s distance. It instantly signals a culture where speed and reliability often outrank originality.

The subtext is less about drudgery than about apprenticeship. By admitting there was “no original reporting,” she distinguishes between performance and production, between saying the news and making it. That distinction quietly frames a professional ethos: credibility isn’t conferred by the microphone alone. You earn it by building reporting muscles, even if your first job doesn’t let you use them.

Then she pivots: “but gave me a taste.” That “but” is the engine of the quote. The task is basic, yet it delivers an early chemical reward: the fusion of politics (content, stakes, power) and broadcasting (voice, timing, presence). In the context of a long career in political journalism, it reads like an origin story that’s pointedly anti-heroic. The intent is to normalize how careers actually start in media: not with scoops, but with proximity to the signal and a growing hunger to move from reading the story to chasing it.