TV & VIDEO - Oct. 4, 1988

From our Inside the Beltway dossier: NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell is upset with the tony Washingtonian magazine. The magazine reported that Mitchell’s famous Republican convention scoop--about the tapping of Sen. Dan Quayle as George Bush’s running mate for the GOP ticket--was actually engineered by right-wing members of the Republican National Committee, who used walkie-talkies and simple code words on the convention floor--hoping that reporters, monitoring the walkie-talkie network, would rush the word on the air. But Mitchell told the Washington Post that the article was “absolutely wrong from start to finish and not true. We don’t know what they’re talking about--we never heard of a walkie-talkie network.” Added NBC News Vice President Tim Russert about the Washingtonian piece: “The (expletive deleted) thing is a joke. It’s a fantasy.”