The Seattle School District bars an EdBlogger from a press conference:

Local blogger Melissa Westbrook, who writes for the blog Save Seattle Schools, was barred from asking questions during a press conference of the Seattle School Board yesterday, right before they approved the new teachers’ contract.

The district’s rationale was nothing new:

Beforehand, when Westbrook called up the Seattle Public Schools Communications Dept. to ask if she could be on the press list, they told her that she could attend, but couldn’t ask questions. Westbrook went anyway, thinking that if other bloggers asked questions, she would too. But reached by phone, Westbrook said that SPS refused to provide a press pass because she was not a “real journalist” and her blogs were more commentary than reporting.

Bear in mind, this story is being reported in “The Stranger”, Seattles version of the “City Pages”.   And they got the absurdity of the district’s stance:

So I asked SPS if they had any set standards for press conferences. District spokesperson Teresa Wippel said the event was for media organizations that “provide unbiased coverage and subscribe to journalistic ethics.” By that, she means “the types of practices outlined in the Code of Ethics from the Society for Professional Journalists,” Wippel said. “It is our opinion that Ms. Westbrook’s blog does not fit into that category.”

The SPJ “Code of Ethics”? Protecting them from scabrous opinion “journalism?”  Hah! Hah Hah!  Hah Hah Hah!

Does that mean the Stranger—which is quite clear about its opinions and makes no attempt to provide “unbiased coverage”—can’t ask questions? Or are they simply allergic to Westbrook, who asks questions that the District doesn’t want to answer? “It’s not like we are shunning off information to people who are not members of the press,” Wippel said. “Westbrook has lots of different ways to ask questions to the board.”

If it’s like the Saint Paul School Board, none of them work.

As for the Stranger, Wippel said we could ask questions because we were a news organization that provides opinion as well as news.

Westbrook—who often takes positions that The Stranger disagrees with—admits that her blogs are sometimes critical of the school district. But she argued that Mayor Mike McGinn’s office has always let her attend press events as a citizen journalist. “I got into the convention for Arne Duncan, and the American Federation of Teachers even gave me a press pass,” she said.

It’s this simple; government at all levels wants to control the message it puts out.  When “journalists” were a predictable troupe of institutional repeat customers, it’s not that difficult. The more diffuse “journalism” becomes, the harder it is to control the message you put out to the public.

A neighbor writes:

Keep raising a stink about this. When our founders wrote the part about the freedom of the press, the press consisted of annoying, opinionated buggers who didn’t subscribe to any code of ethics and provided more commentary than reporting.

No problem.

By the way, someone will ask “if this bothers you, does it also bother you that the Tom Emmer campaign is shunning The Uptake?”  I’m not sure about the Uptake bit – shunning alt-media bugs me, but the Uptake has swerved pretty far into being a pure lefty propaganda site – and it’s not the same situation anyway.  The Emmer campaign isn’t a government body.  Yet.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, September 17th, 2010 at 6:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.