What the Congressional standards are trying to prevent is lobbying under the guise of journalism. They don't aim at journalism that takes a form, or reflects an ideological hue, at odds with members of the Standing Committee's preferences.

Thus it is easy to see the distinction between what goes on with coverage of Congress and what the CCPA is and does.

What is being argued is this: one can be a journalist, and a damn good one, even if one is not impartial and even if one works for a publication that has a clear agenda.

Do you say that the great reporting done on the Vietnam War, for example, by David Halberstam was “objective?” Highly skilled, an indication of awesome talent, thorough, clear, yes, but objective, I think not. And nor should it have been. The problem that Halberstam and Neil Sheehan and others confronted was government deception. They saw it as their duty to be skeptical of that government.

The same approach should have a place at the press tables in the chambers at the Colorado State Capitol. When reporters become so devoted to “objectivity” that they lose the ability to inform the public or point out the dishonesty, cynicism or manipulation of facts that happens often in politics, they don't do their job well.

Moreover, sometimes it is the lack of objectivity itself that makes a good journalist. Do you suppose the editors and writers at The Nation or Mother Jones or Human Events would be motivated to explore the issues about which they publish, and to devote precious ink and space to them, if they didn't have an ideological commitment to those issues?

And it's naive to say that any of the major papers covering the Capitol are “objective.” All of them have editorial philosophies which are reflected not only in the editorial pages but also in the choice of stories that are covered and even the way in which their reporters' stories are edited. Any reporter can tell you war stories about that particular situation.

This dispute is about protectionism, plain and simple. “Truthteller,” you have to accept, whether you think it is a good thing or not, that the media in this country is changing. You can have a good argument about whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but there can be no doubt that it is happening.

And once journalists and publications threatened by the evolution and trends in the industry actually enlist state help to try to blunt that change, then the free press itself is threatened. So is the profession's commitment to the free exchange of ideas in a society that has a political system dependent on that for its vitality and healthy functioning.

The CCPA is an over-reaction. Worse, it will not be effective. As Bob Egewen wrote elsewhere in this thread, a good reporter doesn't need access to the floors to find stories. So what's the point, exactly, other than to make a mountain out of molehill (namely, someone's gripe about Colorado Confidential) at the cost of the profession's ethics and the commitment of the reporters and media companies involved in creating the CCPA to free expression?

I have chosen not to provide my real name here because I am engaged in a project that involves covering the Capitol and, obviously, I don't want to needlessly antagonize those in the Capitol press corps that believe the CCPA is a good idea.

Suffice to say, I have experience covering state legislative matters.

I hope you and others in the Colorado Press Association might consider making a formal statement, even directed to Sen. Groff and Speaker Romanoff, indicating the problems with this whole approach.

Thanks for sharing your point of view.

I am pleased to see here input from Professor Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Norris has identified a passage from Professor Meyer's book, “The Vanishing Newspaper,” that is worth plenty of discussion. Few things get journalists more riled up than his reference to a “professional apparatus.” I stirred that debate on a blog I maintained last year while serving as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists. For kicks, check out

http://spj.org/blog/...

And thanks, Cara DeGette, for your interesting story. As I read it, I certainly wasn't wondering whether you and Colorado Confidential deserve press credentials.

Christine Tatum

Immediate Past National President, Society of Professional Journalists

Assistant Features Editor/Online Features Editor, The Denver Post

Biologists and social scientists alike are starting to agree that moral systems are formed and persist because they have survival value for the social groupings that create them. Journalism's traditional value set was based on the economic and mechanical constraints of the newspaper business. New information technology is forcing us to experiment with new ways of working and that necessarily means experimenting with new ways of defining and organizing our occupational specialties.

…snip…

If journalism is to survive, it will need a professional apparatus as one of the tools in the fight. Trying to reform investors, editors and publishers is a good idea, but let's not wait for those people to change their ways. Those of us who practice or teach journalism at ground level will make progress with greater speed and certainty if we also organizer to reform ourselves. If we can do that, then the next generation of journalists will be ready to work when the process of natural selection chooses the new media forms where trust and social responsibility prevail.

Could you expand on that notion a bit, as it seems in this debate that “floor space” has become a convenient foil for the discomfort some in the traditional media have for their online peers?

http://www.senate.go...

Compare those to the CCPA guidelines:

http://www.state.co….

The congressional rules are much simpler and lack language about “activity intended to influence elections or any matter before the General Assembly or before any independent agency …” that in my opinion trigger all sorts of problems.

  Members are elected by their peers and Congress has delegated to the committee the power to decide who sits in the Press Gallery. The committee has been slow to change with the times and was late in admitting, blacks, women, and online journalists. But it does adapt, and nobody has figured out a better system for allocating the limited space.

  See also my “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” pp. 253-259.

Henry VIII established a licensing system that resembled the prepublication censorship of Pope Innocent VIII. It required printers to submit all manuscripts to church authorities for their approval prior to publication. This licensing system continued in England until 1695. The English poet John Milton protested against such censorship in his classic essay Areopagitica (1644). Many English people associated licensing by church censors with ecclesiastical supervision, the Inquisition, and restraints on religion, education, and intellectual pursuits.

Glad you asked. Here are some examples of how one statehouse beat reporter at a Denver daily has managed to carry the state GOP's water over the past year:

http://colorado.mediamatters.org/issues_topics/..., he's not the only one engaged in this type of "journalism" (Charles Ashby of the Pueblo Chieftain, one of the Capitol club "deciders", also is guilty) just one of the more frequent perpetrators…

Bill Menezes

Editorial Director

Colorado Media Matters 

http://colorado.mediamatters.org