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Journalism
May 13, 2009
Without public ceremony, Perry signs measure intended to shield reporters
Gov. Rick Perry’s office said Wednesday he’s signed into law a proposal drafted to shield reporters from having to reveal confidential sources.
The shield law had long been sought by advocates for newspapers and broadcasters. (See a recent article on the measure here.)
Perry said: “This was a complex issue that required thoughtful consideration, and I am pleased that lawmakers were able to strike a balance between protecting the rights of the people and the press.”
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April 29, 2009
Shield bill back to House, soon
The Free Flow of Information Act that passed the Texas Senate yesterday will have to go back to the House for agreement on minor tweaks, not directly to Perry as our earlier post stated.
Talks for that agreement is expected to move quickly, we’re told, and the bill is expected to soon be on the desk of Gov. Rick Perry, as Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, the Senate sponsor, said yesterday.
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April 28, 2009
Shield law passes Senate 31-0
Once-controversial legislation that could keep journalists from having to disclose their confidential tipsters sailed through the Texas Senate this afternoon on a voice vote.
The so-called Free Flow of Information Act, earlier approved by the House, now goes to Gov. Rick Perry to be signed into law, after almost three decades of wrangling and lobbying over the issue.
The only blip: A last-minute amendment was proposed in the Senate to require media outlets to publish a disclaimer with all stories that relied on confidential sources. After a short, feisty debate it was withdrawn.
“House Bill 670 strikes the delicate balance between preserving the public’s right to know the truth from an independent press, and the state’s ability to uphold justice,” said state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, the bill’s Senate sponsor.
“It ensures journalists can keep their sources and notes confidential, while still allowing law enforcement the ability to acquire truly necessary material. It is not an unbreakable shield, but simply a limited privilege for journalists to protect the confidentiality of their sources.”
Ellis noted that 36 other states and the District of Columbia have “shield laws,” so-called because they shield reporters from having to disclose their confidential sources. News organizations have lobbied for such a law in Texas since the early 1970s, and versions of the proposed law passed the Senate in recent years but died in the House.
Despite its name, Ellis noted that the legal privilege granted to reporters under the measure “is not an unbreakable shield.” Wording agreed to by prosecutors and other earlier opponents would require a journalist to name their confidential source in limted cases.
The disputed amendment was offered by Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, who argued that news organizations should have to publish one of two disclaimers with stories that relied on confidential sources.
One would state that the confidential information was not confirmed, and the other states it was.
“Tell me why this is such a bad idea?” asked state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, saying that many news organizations now run disclaimers on their Web sites noting that information may not be confirmed.
Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, Ellis and others challenged the proposal as unconstitutional prior restraint.
“You are compelling content,” said Ellis. “It runs afoul of the constitiution … the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution.”
“Its their own standards we’re trying to put in here,” Williams shot back, citing cases of made-up stories that won the Pulitzer Prize and “lazy reporters” who do not properly confirm information from confidential sources.
“If we’re going to grant them a qualified privilege … all we’re asking them to do is that they give us a disclaimer.”
When Duncan moved to table Williams’ amendment, and appeared to have the votes to kill it, Williams withdrew his two-page proposal.
The Senate then moved swiftly, approving House BIll 670 within minutes.
“After four years of sometimes intense debate, both the House and the Senate have agreed on the principle that the press plays a vitally important role in our democracy and must be protected from government intimidation,” said Ellis, calling the Senate vote “a truly historic day.”
“With the face of journalism and law enforcement rapidly changing in the 21st century, it is time for Texas … to ensure journalists and their sources are protected in their jobs of keeping the public informed.”
“It’s a good bill,” Lt. Gov. David David Dewhurst said after the Senate adjourned.
Michael Schneider, director of programs for the Texas Association of Broadcasters that lobbied for passage of the bill, agreed. “It’s very important that we provide protection to those individuals who come forward with information … for stories that are told for the public benefit.”
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March 23, 2009
Corpus Christi legislator shepherds shield-law deal
In talks overseen by Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, journalists and district attorneys evidently found common ground on a change in law intended to shield Texas reporters and their notes and video from disclosure in some cases. If the reported deal holds, it’ll amount to a breakthrough for journalism groups that have sought a Texas shield law for several sessions.
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March 3, 2009
UPDATED: AT&T signs on to "air" Texas House proceedings, starting in April
Score a victory for state Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, who’s credited by AT&T for the company’s plans to put Texas House proceedings on its U-Verse video service for TV viewers around Texas. The service, which employs fiber-optic lines, is currently available in Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and Lubbock, with Midland/Odessa lined up next, AT&T spokesman Kerry Hibbs said today.
Castro, as noted here last month, hopes to see both House and Senate floor debates cablecast statewide. He’s still hoping cable companies come around to picking up some of the costs of doing that — which were estimated by a Texas Cable Association representative at about $401,000 during testimony today.
UPDATE: Fetch the cable group’s breakdown of costs by clicking here.
AT&T, meantime, now plans to put House floor sessions on its Channel 99 starting in April. Hibbs said the company awaits the House’s formal OK to put gatherings on its fiber-optic system.
Castro said: “I wanted us to get our foot in the door. I don’t think we can wait for perfection. I am confident that we will make it work with the (other) cable companies.”
Unsaid: Castro probably bets on the cable companies ponying up some of the equipment and satellite signal costs, with the state possibly picking up some costs in the 2010-11 state budget.
Some 28 states televise their legislative sessions. (Austin cable customers have had access to channels showing House and Texas Senate sessions for years.)
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July 17, 2008
Obama Girl invades Netroots Nation
First, here’s the video featuring Obama Girl, Amber Lee Ettinger, visiting the media room at the Netroots Nation conference:
Right after the video was shot (and after Eileen Smith of Texas Monthly’s Poll Dancing shot her own video second), Obama Girl’s handler Melissa asked me not to post the video.
“You brought her to the media room so that we could shoot a video of her and then not post it?” I asked.
Melissa said I was asking her too many political questions that Obama Girl didn’t know the answer to in an effort to make her look dumb.
I told her I don’t cover politics. “Believe me, she probably knows way more about politics than I do,” I told her.
Still, she thought I wasn’t showing Amber’s best side (I disagree), and I promised to post something nice to go with the video. Here it is: she was very nice to agree to the video in the first place and she seems like a perfectly nice young woman. Crush-worthy, even.
Unfortunately, that was how my day at Netroots ended — I wanted answers to all my political questions, and if we can’t count on Obama Girl to figure it all out for us, then I will have to remain disillusioned in our fledgling Internet stars.
(Bonus note: try to find the exact time in the video when Obama Girl got completely bored with me and started looking around for something more interesting to do.)
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Netroots Nation: Waiting for Obama Girl
More evidence that they sent the wrong person to cover Netroots today: instead of listening in on the Latino Caucus session, which was my original plan, I’m hiding out in the chilly, but well-stocked Media Room waiting for Obama Girl.
I had no idea she’d even be in town (doesn’t she have a photo shoot and some short-shorts waiting somewhere?) but according to my new favorite person, Eileen Smith of In the Pink/Texas Monthly, she should be here “Around 5ish.”
I’ve been watching Smith and Karen Brooks of The Dallas Morning News shoot hilarious videos of each other and joking about their anti-Big-Media sticker. I think I’m in the right place.
I e-mailed my editors: “Obama Girl is supposed to be in the Media Room soon. I’m ON IT.”
Hunter S. would be so proud.
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Like real life, with more nude virtual dancing
A “Second Life” panel at Netroots Nation attracted more virtual participants than real ones.
About 30-40 people spread out all over the U.S. (and France) connected to the virtual online world of “Second Life” to participate in a conference where they couldn’t appear physically.
In Austin, however, only about 10 people showed up to see avatars on a giant screen and to appear on video in a giant real-life screen within the virtual world (got all that?).
Some of the participants, with names like, “Spokane Skytower,” “Lake Woebegone” and “John McCain Weezles” (wearing only a thong) boogied on a dance floor. (“Weezles” was being portrayed by a popular blogger.)
Keynotes from Netroots are being fed into “Second Life,” but this was a more intimate affair as people in “SL” greeted everyone in the room (they were also connected by voice via speakers).
It was Wonk Meets Geek. And pretty cool, honestly.
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Netroots Nation: Request for hazard pay
I don’t cover politics, so my apologies in advance for going wildly off-message from what this blog usually covers. (I cover personal technology, which is to politics what the former Planet Pluto is to a can of Pringles.)
Nevertheless I am here at the Convention Center covering Netroots Nation, more as an outsider blogging type than as a hard-nosed political reporter.
The first panel I’ve been to, “Craft Your Message” is in a huge, cavernous room with a giant screen and an enormous panelist table. It looks very expensive. The most number of people I’ve seen in the room so far at one time was 30.
Maybe they didn’t “craft the message” about this panel?
Nevertheless, I have learned that I am in no way qualified to ever run a campaign, political or otherwise. At the end of the presentation, several examples of good campaign ads were shown, and to be honest, they all looked identical to me, with the same lilting, Lite FM (or “Isn’t this sad?” guitar pluckings) background music, the same “I am going to do THIS and it will be AWESOME!” politicalspeak, the same authoritative bold fonts and the same insulting simplifications about the respective opponents.
My plea to the other people in the room is not that they change their ways because something must be working for them all to be employed. My plea is that they just don’t run any of these commercials on channels I actually watch.
Nobody told me that I’d have to sit through TV campaign commercials as part of my job.
I demand hazard pay.
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Netroots Nation: Caucus fail
The first caucus/session I tried to go to at Netroots Nation, “Moms’ Caucus” had this sign on the door:
That’s a bit of a hike. Think I’ll stay here and find somewhere else to go.
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Live blog with 'Netroots Rising' co-author Nate Wilcox
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May 15, 2008
Taibbi's Texas project, Hagee's "apology"
I visited this week with Matt Taibbi, a Rolling Stone contributing editor whose book, “The Great Derangement,” taps research he conducted by posing as a member of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church, whose pastor is John Hagee. Peek at the column here or a book excerpt here.
Hagee, who had no immediate comment on the book when I called, has been under scrutiny lately for what some consider his anti-Catholic remarks as a minister. They’re getting special attention because he’s endorsed U.S. Sen. John McCain for president. This week, Hagee issued a statement interpreted as an apology in media coverage, though the statement I found on the Cornerstone is more an explanatory statement than a mea culpa.
“I am not now, nor have I ever been anti-Catholic,” Hagee says. See his press release here.
While my column focused on Taibbi’s time in Texas, his book presents some pointed commentary on doings in Congress that bear recall.
In one aside, the author describes the drone of an isolationist Tennessee Republican rising to speak on the floor of the U.S. House. Turns out that that Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr., assumed his post on the death of his father, who had been elected a dozen consecutive times. “Three hundred years from now,” Taibbi goes on, “the city of Knoxville’s congressman will be a Duncan opposed to the extension of foreign aid to Pluto.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, gets a prime pasting in Taibbi’s recap of an effort by Barton after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans to say the disaster demonstrated an emergency need to lift longtime restrictions on air pollutants from plants built after 1970 as spelled out in the Clean Air Act.
After Barton mis-summarized the measure, Taibbi writes, a Massachusetts Democrat on the committee hearing the matter said that if he’d given a similar summary to his constituents at a Massachusetts gas station, they “wouldn’t leave me in one piece.”
“Well, what I do at a Texas gas station, when people ask if I’m Congressman Barton,” Barton replied, smiling, “is this… I just tell ‘em I’m his driver.” The comment drew laughs all around.
A couple more then-House members get mention: Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, and Chris Bell, the Houston Democrat who raised ethics questions about DeLay in his lame-duck last months in the House.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Democratic politics, Elections, Journalism, Money, Presidential race, Republican politics, U.S. Congress, U.S. Senate
March 31, 2008
Bush's reception? Decidedly mixed, from where I was sitting.
So any time that President Bush leaves the White House, he takes what’s called the press pool with him. It’s a handful of reporters and photographers from various types of media — one newspaper reporter, a couple of wire reporters, one TV network, etc. In the case of newspaper reporters, the job of the pool reporter is to capture every detail that he or she sees and report it back to all other reporters who cover the White House, and they’re then free to use it in their stories.
Once a month, I have pool duty, and I had it Sunday. Weekend pool duty usually means you have to be at the White House very early to caravan out into the woods so Bush can ride his bike around out of your sight. Such was the case Sunday morning, and here was the first of the day’s pool reports that I filed:
“Pool report 1, 3-30-08
President left the White House in motorcade at about 8 am for biking at Secret Service training facility near Beltsville, Md. He was joined by Secret Service agents and, possibly, unidentified guests.
Pool did not see him, but did enjoy a Godfather marathon on AMC while we waited.
Arrived back at White House shortly after 10, with a lid until 5:50.”
Later Sunday night, Bush headed to Nationals Park for the local baseball team’s season opener against the Braves. It was also the first regular-season game at the new stadium. This was a better-than-average pool assignment. (Pool duty, incidentally, is doled out alphabetically each month, so as far as I know, the White House does not choose reporters based on which events are coming up on the schedule).
Here’s my pool report from the game:
“Pool report 2, 3-30-08
Potus (President of the United States) and motorcade arrived at Nationals Park about 7 pm. He disappeared for more than an hour for clubhouse visits.
After both the Braves and Nationals were introduced on the field (Nats’ starters came in from outfield), and after Denyce Graves sang the national anthem, the two teams cleared the field. Nationals manager Manny Acta, 3B Ryan Zimmerman and owner Ted Lerner came back on. Then Bush emerged from the Nationals’ dugout to throw the first pitch. He wore a red Nationals jacket and dark slacks.
It seemed there were more cheers than boos, but not by much. He walked quickly to the mound and almost immediately, with a high delivery, threw a high fastball that would have been a ball to anyone other than Yao Ming. Acta rose to catch it, manager and president quickly shook hands and Bush was waving to the crowd as he walked back into the dugout. The crowd reaction after the pitch was decidedly mixed. Bush, back in the dugout, gave the ball to team President Stan Kasten and he went back up the tunnel. Bush smiled throughout, despite the boos.
We’re told Potus is watching the game from the owner’s box and will do ESPN commentary in the third inning. It is now bottom of first and pool is watching from what appears to be a press conference room.”
We left the game in the fifth and ended up back at the White House for the night.
My description of the crowd reaction is catching some criticism on the blogs, based on what people heard at the game or on television. You can watch for yourself on YouTube. All I can say is that I reported what I heard, which has been backed up by people at the game — they announced Bush, there was a heavy amount of cheering initially, then the booing kicked in, he threw the pitch, and there was a continued mixed reaction afterward. I was right behind home plate on the field, which I think was a good place to gauge the stadium-wide reaction. But based on where you were sitting or where the ESPN microphones were, you might have heard something different. I think I got it right, but I’ll admit it’s more an art than a science. The booing certainly intensified after the pitch.
For you wrestling fans out there, think of a typical John Cena reaction.
Update:
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March 26, 2008
Bullock book generates buzz of a program
The first-year University of Texas Center for Politics and Governance drew a cross-section of state leaders past and present to a forum Wednesday night mostly celebrating the biography of Bob Bullock co-authored by journalists Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson. It’s “Bob Bullock, God Bless Texas,” viewable here.
It was a rich program, fueled by spicy memories offered by Democratic figures — two former lieutenant governors (Ben Barnes and Bill Hobby), one state senator and former acting lieutenant governor (Rodney Ellis of Houston) and three former Texas House speakers (Barnes, Gib Lewis and Pete Laney), though I suspect the very best tales were held back, given the crowd and the presence of at least two note-taking scribes. And I kind of wish they’d fit in a Republican or two.
I say “mostly celebrating” because the formal program ended on a note of friction. John Keel, a Bullock protégé who’s now the state auditor, requested five minutes to make a statement. He didn’t get his wish. But moderator Paul Stekler allowed him to read aloud a letter that Keel attributed to Bullock’s surviving wife, Jan.
Keel said he was reading from a letter that she sent to McNeely, dated May 4, 2007. By Keel’s reading, Mrs. Bullock said she couldn’t be part of the biographical project. Having read a version of the manuscript, Keel read, Mrs. Bullock found “a lot of mistakes.” In the letter, Keel said, she said she found the text slanderous to innocent people, mean to others and untrue to her late husband and his accomplishments.
McNeely told the crowd at UT that the book covered the good, the bad and the ugly of the long-serving state comptroller and lieutenant governor.
Henderson, speaking next, said he and McNeely didn’t win access to everyone around Bullock. He said they also were denied lasting access to an oral history of Bullock kept by Baylor University.
Things like that, Henderson said, shouldn’t stop anyone from writing a book.
There is likely more to the story behind this first attempt to write a full biography of Bullock — from the authors’ perspectives and from those who knew Bullock best. I hope to learn more.
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February 21, 2008
Views from the UT Recreational Sports Center media area
The spin room, which will be a lot more crowded later.
The press filing center. I’m thinking of asking if we can change the channel.
Radio reporters have their own area called radio row.
They have a nice view of the racquetball courts.
