Michele Mitchell is a woman on the run. Not only is she a marathoner in her “down” time, she’s also prone to dash out of New York at a moment’s notice, to conduct an interview for PBS’s “NOW With Bill Moyers,” for which she’s a correspondent, or to read from her first novel, “The Latest Bombshell.” The book is a modern-day reinterpretation of the Dreyfus affair, substituting a muckraking Washington journalist for the wrongly convicted French Army officer of the infamous treason trial of the 1890s.

Writing about politics comes naturally to Ms. Mitchell,34.She was born in Yorba Linda, Calif., now the site of the Richard Nixon Library, and her father, a commercial artist, was an enthusiastic fan of the former president. One of Ms. Mitchell’s earliest memories was hearing her father bark at the television the president’s “only mistake was getting caught.” In such a context, Ms. Mitchell’s politically oriented journalism career seems aimed at riling dad. Whatever her motivation, she has spent the last several years analyzing what the government says and how its actions measure up.

Ms. Mitchell has been working at “NOW With Bill Moyers” since March, after having spent about two years as a political analyst at CNN.

“I am so thankful to be sitting at Bill’s feet, soaking up his wisdom. And it is a joy to work at a place full of smart, interesting, nice people who are extremely good at what they do. You know you are listened to, but you learn a lot as well,” she said. And instead of having a few minutes a day to explain a complex story, as was her fate at CNN, she now has 15 minutes of airtime (and up to six weeks’ research time) to do so.

Her stories have included a look into the controversial use of computerized voting machines in Florida and across the country. “Diebold, whose CEO happens to be a major contributor to the Bush campaign, and other companies that make the new touch screen voting machines say they aren’t able to generate a paper copy of the vote to serve as a backup. Well, those companies also make ATM machines, and we all get paper receipts from those, so why can’t they do it for the votes?”

Ms. Mitchell’s has been dedicated to journalism since working on her high-school paper. She earned a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern. During her first year, she sent some of her teenage clips to the Chicago Tribune, and a flurry of assignments followed.

After college, Ms. Mitchell headed for Washington, D.C., where she took a job as communications director for the conservative Democratic Rep. Pete Geren of Texas. At the time, she was the youngest person to ever hold the position. “Since me, they’ve learned they can hire younger people who’ll work longer hours for less pay than the old pros,” Ms. Mitchell said.

Her four years on Capitol Hill inspired her first book,1998’s “A New Kind of Party Animal,” subtitled “How The Young Are Tearing Up The Political Landscape.” In it, she examined the disillusionment of Gen-Xers with the two mainstream American political parties. Ms. Mitchell contended that her generation wasn’t apathetic, but rather ill-served by the parties. “It was a load of crap,” she said. “I was meeting plenty of activists, politicos, and other very involved young people.”

The book drew some scathing reviews but also raised her media profile. “After that, not a lot upsets me. I was really run through the mill by some folks, but I was young and I learned from it.” Ms. Mitchell next landed at CNN Headline News, serving as a political analyst for the 2000 election. That race – especially the heated South Carolina Republican primary battle between then-candidates Senator McCain and George Bush – provoked her to begin what became “The Latest Bombshell.”

As she waded through the thicket of political stories during the Bush administration’s first two years, she garnered lots of viewer feedback. She also had a run-in with a protege of the new attorney general. “Just after 9/11, he ordered a curtain to be draped over the bare breasts on the statue of The Spirit of Justice, which had stood in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice since the 1930s. I found out that John Ashcroft is actually an artist himself – he has a 6-foot-high rendering of the Statue of Liberty in his barn in Missouri. It is made out of barbed wire.”

A few weeks later at a bar in Washington, she was confronted by one of Mr. Ashcroft’s employees. “I’d done some stories on the Patriot Act by that time,” Ms. Mitchell said. “This guy I don’t know walks up to me and says, ‘You don’t like my boss very much.’ I asked who his boss was. He said ‘John Ashcroft.'” Ms. Mitchell continued. “Then he said, ‘Well, some people are beginning to question your patriotism.'”

To Ms. Mitchell’s mind, her patriotism was hardly questionable, but she found the press’s terrorism coverage problematic. “The press at that time seemed defanged by the administration. Since then, some people have gotten their teeth back, but it’s still a strange time. We’re in unchartered waters. How should a journalist act? Nobody wants to be thought of as against their own country, but who defines patriotism?”

After leaving CNN in 2003, she threw herself into writing “The Latest Bombshell.” In it, Lyle Gold, a journalist, is falsely accused of selling military secrets to the Chinese and imprisoned. Political consultant Kate Boothe jumps in to take up the fight for truth, justice and what was once known as The American Way. The sequel, tentatively titled, “Our Girl In Washington,” is due out next summer.