AEJMC Members Forum

By KAREN SALERNI

AEJMC Reporter

The AEJMC board has made it official: Journalists are welcome to cover the association of journalism educators in the future.

The board unanimously passed a resolution to that effect at its business meeting Saturday morning, ending two days of squabbling after a crew from C-SPAN was turned away from a convention panel Thursday on Supreme Court coverage. “We’re an organization that is committed to freedom of information and open meetings,” outgoing President Wayne Wanta said Sunday.

The resolution, passed after a brief discussion, says: “C-SPAN and any other news organization is welcome to cover all open panels and presentations of AEJMC, and speakers will be informed of that policy.”

“Something happened that almost all of our entire membership would’ve disagreed with, and our reaction to that, I think, has been positive,” said Wanta, a professor at the University of Missouri.

The resolution was a response to the flap that began Thursday when New York Times legal reporter Linda Greenhouse asked that a C-SPAN crew be barred from a session she was participating in.

Greenhouse said she had not been told beforehand that the event would be televised and argued that the discussion between her and the other panelists, all senior legal reporters, would not be the same if it was broadcast.
At that point, panel organizers asked the C-SPAN crew to leave.

Although Wanta said most AEJMC members he spoke to were shocked that coverage of the session was banned, some convention-goers agreed with Greenhouse.

“It’s a different conversation when it’s recorded,” said Thomas Mascaro, who attended the panel.

“Anyone would be wise to think and know that anything said today could be distributed, which is especially true of recordings,” said Mascaro, an associate professor at Bowling Green State University.

Following Thursday’s events, C-SPAN Vice President of Programming Terry Murphy sent a sharp letter to AEJMC Executive Director Jennifer McGill and the panelists. Murphy said it was particularly troubling that the press was being kicked out by a panel of journalists at a conference of journalism educators.
“If professors of journalism, and working journalists taking part in a journalism education conference don’t stand up for open media access in public policy discussions, who will?” Murphy asked in his letter.

Greenhouse shot back with her own letter Friday, after the flap was reported in the AEJMC Reporter and the Columbia Journalism Review, and cited by Jim Romenesko in his column for the Poynter Institute.

Greenhouse said Murphy had missed the point. It was not a question of open media access but “one of communication and simple courtesy.” She should have been told beforehand that the event would be broadcast, instead of finding out when she showed up.

She told Murphy that it was “incumbent on C-SPAN and event organizers to do their homework,” and wrote that she had not been informed about the media coverage until she arrived at the panel Thursday.

But at least one panel member, Charles Lane of The Washington Post, said that panel moderator Amy Gajda of the University of Illinois “told me ahead of time that C-SPAN would be there.” He said he also got an e-mail the day before the event notifying him of the C-SPAN coverage.

“I walked in fully prepared with C-SPAN or without them,” he said Friday. “It was like many, many other panels I’ve been on with that group (of Supreme Court beat reporters) over the years.”

Thursday was not the first time Greenhouse had refused C-SPAN coverage. She said last week that she had denied C-SPAN access to previous meetings that she was in charge of.

Ironically, the bulk of the AEJMC session was given over to reporters talking about a slow move toward openness by the high court, traditionally one of the most closed branches of government.

Other panelists included Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, and ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg.

Until Saturday’s vote, AEJMC had said it would have no official comment on the situation.

In addition to the resolution, Wanta said he will send a letter of apology to C-SPAN.

“This should not have happened, and I feel bad that it did under my watch as president of the organization,” he said.

“It’s ironic,” Wanta said of the flap. “I think the fact that we had some bad press is understandable.”