Intellectual Property Law

Journalists in Denver Face the Pokey for...What?

By Cynthia Brumfield

Two incidents this week at the Democratic National Convention make me a little worried. First, Salon's Glenn Greenwald got hassled by private security and was threatened with arrest for videoblogging outside an AT&T-sponsored party for Blue Dog Democrats, an event that was supposedly held to thank the conservative Democrats for their assistance in securing telecom immunity in warrantless wiretapping situations.

If you watch the video, you'll see that Greenwald kept moving farther and farther away from the event, as instructed by security guards, but the distance wasn't enough. The cops were called to push Greenwald even farther away from the party - they intimated that Greenwald could be arrested for violating the law.

In the second incident, an ABC producer was actually arrested for taking pictures on a public sidewalk outside the Brown Palace Hotel. He has been charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order because he was taking pictures of Democratic Senators and big donors leaving a meeting.

Now, it's possible that AT&T, in the first incident, and The Brown Palace Hotel, in the second incident, were solely responsible for calling the cops on the journalists. It's possible that the Democratic legislators didn't know anything about these situations until after the fact.

But it's somehow unseemly for Democrats to be involved in calling the police to harass or arrest journalists -- more disquieting than if Republicans were to do the same thing. We expect more tightly controlled communications from Republicans, particularly after eight years of a totally scripted Bush Administration.

I would also argue that such heavy-handed tactics are the least effective way of managing the press. Couldn't a savvy PR person or seasoned pol have diffused the situation by negotiating with the journalists or dangling promises of even better material or even inviting the reporters for free rounds of drinks (a tried but true method that works almost every time)?

In any event, calling the cops on reporters is what I would call a PR technique of last resort. Yet it has happened at least twice so far at the convention in Denver. Let's hope someone smart figures out some other way of dealing with annoying reporters.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on August 27, 2008 (boomark / email).