My friend Chris Barber, editor of the Avon Grove Sun, was just turned away from this afternoon's "Farewell to Camp Tweedale" closing ceremony by officials from the local Girl Scout Council, the same ones who made the unpopular decision to close down the camp and sell the property.
"No press," they told her.
Now, see, banning the press from an event is something you really don't want to do if you're smart. You may not want reporters or photographers there, for whatever reason (and possibly a justified reason), but kicking them out makes it look like you have something to hide.
And you know they're write the story anyway -- as Chris did, being a resourceful woman (she is a former Girl Scout, after all). Nothing gets the fourth estate more jazzed up than suspecting that there's a juicy story out there that somebody is trying to prevent them from writing.
When I was a full-time reporter in another part of Pennsylvania, I used to cover a particularly quarrelsome borough council that met in a one-room building (they used to meet in the fire hall but managed to tick off the chief). They once kicked me out of the room so they could hold a dubious executive session, forgetting that the windows were open and I was standing outside and could hear everything anyway. Naturally, I reported on their discussion, complete with quotations.
At the next meeting they went into executive session again and went around the table furiously accusing each other of leaking the conversation to "that girl reporter." Even the mayor, a gentle, kindly minister, took his share of the vitriol.
And do you understand that this is why so many of us, who strongly support a free press, have lost respect for so many of the practitioners of journalism?
ReplyDeleteYou actually eavesdropped on a meeting that was publicly announced as closed to the public. Maybe you didn't think it should have been. But I think journalists should honor those conventions. And too often these days, they don't.
I read the other day that many news outlets have decided to stop honoring news embargos with a specific release time. OK, fine, and with the 24-hour news cycle I was surprised to learn that PR folks even do that any more. But part of the point of the embargo was to allow reporters to do some real reporting, and then write a story to be released at the agreed-upon time. The reporting was more in-depth and the resultant stories were much better than what we're getting today -- slapdash, first-take stuff that needs to be corrected and expanded upon ad infinitum.
I love logging on to the Internet at 3 a.m., as I just did, and finding new material. But I don't think I'm learning as much as I used to from newspapers because they have no time to really absorb, never mind analyze, the latest "news."
Thanks for your extraordinarily well-written comments. I did eavesdrop, you're right. But this was a town council that ran roughshod over the rules for what could be discussed in executive session, so I felt justified in doing so.
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