Any Chicago reporter who has ever covered a “building beat,” such as City Hall, can tell you how to go about getting answers from a media-phobic public official.
You approach the alderman or city department chief in the hallway as they head to or from a meeting. You get to them before they can duck and hide in an office or waiting limousine.
If that approach to gathering the news strikes you as a little overly aggressive, we respectfully have to disagree. These are public officials, paid by you, going about public business in a public building. It’s their job to be accountable to the public, and that includes answering the questions that reporters ask on the public’s behalf.
The U.S. Senate apparently does not see things that way. At least not when it comes to full and transparent news coverage of the biggest political and government story of our time, President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.
In a complete rewrite of the usual rules of engagement, reporters covering the trial, which begins in earnest on Tuesday, will be prohibited from approaching senators in hallways and corridors as they enter or leave the Senate chambers. Reporters will be restricted, instead, to nearby roped-off areas.
Additionally, only a few Senate-controlled video cameras will be allowed in the chambers to record the trial. There will be no network or cable cameras. Possibly not even a C-Span camera.
Like in some kind of Soviet-era show trial, you’ll be able to see and hear whomever is speaking, but quite possibly nothing and nobody else — no reaction shots, no empty chairs. It essentially will be Senate President Mitch McConnell’s call.
You have to wonder what the Senate’s Republican majority, which sets the rules, is afraid you might see and hear.
The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press and 57 news organizations have sent a letter to Senate leaders to protest the rules, noting that they are far more restrictive than those imposed during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
“To deny journalists their constitutional right to document the historical events occurring now is a gross injustice to the American people,” Patricia Gallagher Newberry, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, told NPR.
The president of the United States is on trial.
The American people have a right to see it all — and to full and independent coverage by professional journalists.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.
