A Media Revolt

Yesterday I wrote about the McCain campaign limiting media access and how this strategy could backfire. Here are the details on a mini-media revolt that forced the McCain campaign to reconsider access rules for the media.

The New York Times reports:

Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is scheduled to meet Tuesday in New York with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

But the McCain-Palin campaign’s sharp limitations on coverage of the meetings have sparked a mini-revolt – and a threatened boycott — among the press corps.

The campaign plans to bar print reporters from the meetings, and to limit coverage to brief photo-ops for a still photographer and a television camera. The television stations, though, are objecting, noting that they have a policy of not sending cameras to cover events without a producer, who provided editorial guidance.

A stand-off has ensued, with the networks threatening not to send cameras. The newspapers are trying to get back into the act as well.

The article was later updated to reflect that the campaign had relented.

Update | 12:17 p.m.: Word now is that a print reporter will be allowed in at the next two meetings. Stayed tuned for updates on all the handshakes and pleasantries…

Update | 12:02 p.m.: The campaign is relenting and letting in the television producer, so the camera crew will be going as well. But print reporters are up in arms about being excluded.

CBS News criticizes the unprecedented restrictions on media access to Palin.

The McCain/Palin campaign’s effort to stifle editorial coverage of the candidate’s meetings with world leaders comes a week after CBS News asked Palin an impromptu question about the AIG bailout, while Palin made an off-the-record stop at a Cleveland diner.

After the Cleveland event, a Palin staffer told CBS News that questions “weren’t allowed.”

In Orlando on Sunday, Palin had another off-the-record stop at an ice cream shop, but the pool producer who was assigned to be in Palin’s motorcade was not notified when the candidate departed to get ice cream, and so there was no editorial presence at the event.

Politico reports on media restrictions as well.

NEW YORK – Journalists, displeased with Sarah Palin’s efforts to restrict their access to her, are threatening not to cover her events surrounding the United Nations conference here unless they're allowed more access.

The unfolding boycott is the latest development in a rocky relationship between Palin’s handlers and the press, in which the campaign has sought to tightly control her interactions with the media.

In a separate article, Politico reports that the McCain campaign has severely limited access to national media, favoring coverage by local news sources which tends to be a lot less critical of the campaign.

...In that stretch, John McCain has all but cut himself off from the national press corps, an increasingly frustrated contingent of political scribes rumbling through battleground states on the campaign's second-tier bus. Some reporters still get face time with the Arizona senator. The Washington Post may be shut out, but the Palm Beach Post rides up front. And if you're a reporter with the Concord Monitor or Allentown Morning Call, you have a better shot of asking McCain about the race than anyone who with a Washington, D.C. ZIP code.

Even The Associated Press, which is distributed to more than 1,500 newspapers nationwide, suffers from the McCain camp's national-local divide, with the wire's local reporters more likely to be offered a seat next to McCain than its national reporters.