We like Andrea Mitchell when she's practicing the fine art of journalism. We don't like Andrea Mitchell when she tries anchoring more than 30 seconds of MSNBC programming or bigfoots her colleagues for special treatment. So, we have a sort of wishy-washy feeling toward her. But our feelings aside, she's an ace reporter; a veteran NBC News foreign affairs correspondent, she's earned her keep.

So it makes sense that she'd have a hand in reporting on the news that's affecting every American and, thus, every human being on earth: the collapse of the U.S. economy.

But the struggling financial markets aren't the only angle to this beat — there's also the political angle, because Bush, Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin are all weighing in on how many billions of dollars we're going to lend to who, and how many trillions of dollars our deficit will end up with. And that's really Mitchell's main territory.

But then there's one small eentsy-weentsy tiny infinitesimal issue: Mitchell's husband is a man named Alan Greenspan. You might know him as the ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, which he led until 2006 and, some might argue, laid the groundwork to get us into this mess. So might that conflict of interest preclude Mitchell from reporting on, well, anything right now?

The Columbia Journalism Review makes a pretty strong argument:

Greenspan, by virtue of his nearly-nineteen-year chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board, is, to some extent, culpable in the crisis we’re facing. Critics have accused the Greenspan-led Fed of inflating the housing bubble by keeping loan rates too low for too long, encouraging reckless lending and borrowing. Greenspan himself has admitted as much, telling CBS last year, “While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late. I really didn’t get it until very late in 2005 and 2006.”

[...]

The degree of Greenspan’s culpability in the current meltdown is certainly debatable. One could argue, as he does, that its root cause wasn’t the interest rates of the mortgages themselves, but their repackaging. What isn’t debatable, though, is the fact that, as chairman of the body that presided over the economy while it began its slow-before-sudden descent into Dante-conomic hell, the legacy of Greenspan’s Fed chairmanship is intimately entwined in the crisis.

Mitchell's on-air reportage, to be sure, isn't just repeating what Obama and McCain are saying, but offering up pseudo-commentary on the Fed's decisions. Thus, NBC News says it's "[making] decisions about Andrea’s reporting on the current financial crisis on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. There are countless aspects of the story that present absolutely no potential for conflict whatsoever. In cases where we feel the focus of a given storyline may present a problem, we assign those stories to another correspondent. We are 100 percent comfortable with all of her reporting thus far."

Mitchell may very well be capable of offering up completely unbiased reportage. Or she may believe she can, and have NBC News convinced, too. But the people they must answer to are their viewers: Might the average person look at Mitchell's coverage of the financial crisis differently if they're aware of who she's married to? Might they wonder whether she'll ask the "tough questions" — like: Who's responsible? Might Alan Greenspan bear some culpability? — given who she exchanged vows with?

Those are fair questions, and so far, nobody has really answered them. At the very least, should we expect Mitchell to introduce each segment with, "BTW, I'm married to the guy who might've helped get us into this mess"?