This whole thing is
just hilarious to me. Depending on who you trust or what conspiracy theories you believe, an Orlando Sentinel reporter last week was kidnapped by Joe Biden's handlers and locked in a closet for hours, then granted an exclusive, then covered up in a secret plot by the liberal media.
Ok. Some of that is surely true, but you should really all read Scott Powers' first person account.
He blames the blogosphere for blowing this story out of proportion, though I must say no well-read blog is buying into the cover-up notions outside of the crazy comments sections.
But if people are outraged by the treatment of this journalist, that's great! What they need to know, in that case, is that political reporters who cover events with the president or vice president are always treated this way, if not worse. The level of surprise on the part of Orlando Sentinel people at the way this story has gone viral speaks in part to just how matter-of-fact this sort of thing is within the world of political journalism.
Let me recount what was my closest bout with a national politician of this order. In October 2000, I got to interview Dick Cheney during a visit to the Villages. Cheney was still a candidate, so I cannot claim this get was as big as Powers landing an interview with Biden, and the interview was a roundtable, not an exclusive.
But to the same degree that Powers was imprisoned by the Biden people, I was absolutely kidnapped and taken across county lines by the staff for Cheney and his band of thugs! Well, maybe not kidnapped in a burlap-sack-over-the-head, send-notes-to-my-family-demanding-money kind of way. But I did end up 100 miles away from where I expected to be that day.
As I mentioned, I was in Cheney's vicinity so I could cover a campaign event in The Villages, a ginormous subdivision headquartered in Lake County and developed by one of the biggest GOP donors in the state of Florida. In advance, we had been promised an interview with Cheney, but my boss at The Daily Commercial had already warned this then 22-year-old reporter that we may end up with only comments from the speech. The event, held outside in a shopping district, was more crowded than the Cheney folks had expected, and there was no way an interview of any worth was going to happen there. But handlers said it could still happen for us if I traveled to Ocala, the next stop of the day.
I was there with a reporter from the Sentinel, who could not travel but didn't care that much because the metro paper had interviews Cheney multiple times by then. For my two-county paper, this was very obviously the only shot at Cheney we would get. A reporter from the Ocala Star-Banner was there too, and she was angry that no interview would be done in Lake County, but agreed to go along and complain the whole way. There was also a Daytona-based TV station which had been teasing an interview with Cheney all day long. I can't remember the name.
At this point, I naively believed we would board the national press bus, a Greyhound with telecommunications equipment on top and some notable national journalists (though none whom I can recall the names of) inside ready to adopt this band of local reporters-turned-traveling press. But it was soon made clear there was no room on that bus. Instead, we would all sit in a crowded van with event staff, bunched in like convicts being transferred between prison facilities.
One big difference between us and prisoners, though, we were abandoning our cars. We all had driven to the event in The Villages on our own. But media check-in for an event like this is a lengthy ordeal. We would not leave and meet up at the next event, as that would presumably give us the opportunity to load up ammo and other dangerous materials we failed to bring in to the Lake County event but which we would not forget in Ocala. Yes, that is far-fetched, but security would not tolerate us leaving and coming back in for another event down the road unless we were traveling with Cheney people the whole time.
So we shuttled to a large gymnasium-type facility in Ocala, where we all were held by security under a set of dingy bleachers. The Star-Banner reporter was getting increasingly cranky. We were joined by an AP reporter and by some high school newspaper editor who won some type of lottery and was promised one question of the Vice President. There was no waterboarding, but I was forced to endure the same stump speech from Cheney for the second time that day.
In a particularly odd moment, then-Gov. Jeb Bush showed up among the press to see that we were being treated ok. Again, the reporter from the Star Banner spoke up. He tried to alleviate the situation, even helped carry recording equipment for media to a tiny round-table setup in a back room.
Then Cheney came in, along with Rep. Cliff Stearns, and we were each allowed one question. One. I can't even remember what I asked. When it was all done, Cheney, Bush and Stearns got up and departed, and that was it. I went around explaining to event staff that I had no car, which somehow surprised everybody, but was driven back to The Villages by a low-ranking staffer.
And all of this is to say what? Not that I was mistreated. On the contrary, while I detest Dick Cheney's presence on earth as a matter of principle, I felt the media had been treated remarkably well. I got a question. Of a vice presidential candidate. What more could I ask?
I have since covered presidential visits to Florida one four other occasions - twice for Bush visits, twice for Obama - and never gotten so close to the subject as to shout a question from the rope line. So for me, things turned out pretty well that day.
I am sure I made some joking comments in the newsroom about the kidnapping, and about the long waits, and the fact I couldn't file a story until 7pm on an event that began at 2pm. But the comments were joking, the same way Scott Powers joked about Joe Biden tossing him in a closet.
Covering presidential or vice presidential visits is very exciting - during the exciting parts. But a whole lot of it is sitting around, waiting for someone important to come help you. If you push too hard, there is always the possibility security will just kick you out. And scream all you want about the rights of the press, once you are denied access there is no getting it back once a moment has passed. While you are sitting around behind some bleachers or in a storage closet, it is easy to get pissed about what you aren't covering, mostly because you would rather be covering something than just waiting around. But you also wonder if the official is having some clandestine meeting with a rich donor. He probably is, by the way, but there is nothing inherently illegal about that.
Anyway, if people think the press should have better access to leaders, the press sure isn't going to disagree. But people only seem to be concerned about it when the other side is "obstructing." None of the conservatives bitching right now about Biden's treatment of the Sentinel cared a lick about the wall of secrecy that surrounded the Bush-Cheney White House. That's just how it goes, I guess.
So it isn't really that big a deal that Biden locked Scott Powers in a closet. But if the world disagrees, I sure wouldn't mind seeing local press treated a little better as a result
