How reporters do their job isn’t much of a story until the story becomes how your elective representatives deliberately make it harder for reporters to cover them.
That’s what happened when Republicans threw reporters off the floor of the Virginia Senate, exiling them to the gallery.
Nineteen days later, this past Monday — after negotiations between the Senate Republican leadership and the Virginia Capital Correspondents Association — reporters returned to the floor. The tables at which they worked were gone, replaced with six cramped, table-desk combos that recall what I sat in as a schoolboy during detention study hall.
This episode should be remembered for what it was: a pre-emptive, punitive exercise by senators who don’t like reporters.
That’s because they’ve been targets of the press. Or they’ve always been afraid of the press. Or they don’t know how to deal with the press and don’t intend to try. The press-as-the-enemy is a big part of the GOP narrative. It allows Republicans to cast themselves as victims. It got Senate Republicans into trouble.
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Reporters don’t get a lot of sympathy. That’s understandable. We show up where we’re not welcome. We invade people’s privacy. We ask questions that would make Caesar’s wife blush. We can get things wrong. Even when we correct our mistakes, the sting of the error can endure. All of this is conveniently deemed by some Republicans as evidence of liberal bias.
That said, running us off the floor generated a lot of sympathy for us among state Capitol habitues. But that’s rooted in their lack of sympathy for the powerful Republican who schemed to get rid of us: Tommy Norment, the Senate majority leader from James City County.
From every indication, few senators knew what Norment had in mind. When copies of the proposed Senate rules, in which the press ban was embedded, were first circulated among members, most didn’t notice the new restriction.
Instead, they focused on personally important matters. That included committee assignments. For legislators, they are measure of their standing among their peers and a platform for soliciting contributions.
The Republican leadership said reporters were being chased from the floor, to which they’d had access for more than a century, because senators needed to move more easily around the hulking, carved wood rostrum. That’s where the clerk and her staff work. Also, the lieutenant governor presides over the Senate from the rostrum.
Funny thing, though: The leadership never brought this concern to the attention of reporters ahead of the 2016 General Assembly, perhaps giving both sides a chance to negotiate mutually agreeable accommodations and avoiding nearly three weeks of ill will. But that’s because surprise was essential to banishing the press to the cheap seats.
The press-access dispute exposed fissures within the Senate Republican Caucus that its leaders were determined to conceal.
Some members were intent on consigning reporters to the cramped corners of the gallery, concluding it was wiser to go along with the favor-dispensing leadership. Others were determined that reporters retain the privileges of the floor, believing that their leaders were being petty bullies. Some just didn’t care.
Senators say the leadership wanted to avoid a public vote on reopening the floor to the press — and it did. Even if the vote were strictly procedural — say, on whether the Senate should accelerate consideration of a revision to the rules — were it approved with a half-dozen or so independently minded Republicans joining the 19 Democrats, the remaining Republicans would be seen as resisting transparency in government.
That public-relations problem is tied to any number of proposals this year that would impede the public’s right to know but have nothing to do with whether reporters cover the Senate from the floor. Still, a vote against the press in Richmond could generate headaches back home, with local reporters and editors eager to get on the record the politicians who, in effect, voted against going on the record.
Many Senate Republicans are told by their handlers that they shouldn’t bother with the press; that an occasional bow is sufficient.
These lawmakers, instead, communicate the new-fashioned way: via social media, using Facebook, Twitter and other online sites to tell their stories directly to those whose votes count most. These would be the conservative activists who have disproportionate influence because computer-driven gerrymandering disenfranchises almost everyone else.
Because partisan redistricting means boundaries are drawn to eliminate competition, to produce a particular result, the politicians who win made-to-order seats can do so by largely bypassing the press and without developing even basic skills for engaging reporters.
Most senators are people persons — their craft demands it — but several stand out for an inability to take questions from reporters without appearing to break into a sweat or becoming petulant. Sometimes these reactions are specific to certain reporters.
Then there are those, particularly Republicans, who can’t help but schmooze reporters. Among them: Bill Stanley of Franklin County, the wisecracking chief whip, and Tom Garrett of Buckingham County, who publicly confronted Norment over the press ban and, in the process, strengthened the anti-Establishment bona fides of his congressional candidacy. Bryce Reeves of Spotsylvania County isn’t bad at the press game. But then he’s also angling for lieutenant governor in 2017.
Emmett Hanger of Augusta County is just friendly — with everyone.
Amanda Chase of Chesterfield County has taken to the floor to promote open government, announcing — with a Northern Virginia Democratic delegate, Mark Levine — a so-called transparency caucus.
She probably didn’t ingratiate herself to the Republican leadership by defeating a longtime incumbent, Steve Martin, in last June’s primary. One can only imagine what the poobahs make of her stance on freedom of information.
Say this for Norment: He’s managed the impossible — he’s made the Republican-controlled House of Delegates look good.
Speaker Bill Howell of Stafford County can be prickly with the press, if not openly hostile to some reporters. But he’s allowing a little more sunshine in government with new rules giving the House more time to plumb details of the state budget before a final vote and banning committee meetings at delegates’ desks in the House chamber because it’s off-limits to the public.
For Howell it’s a twofer: He can tout the House as a temple of transparency and get a good laugh — at Norment’s expense.
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at(804) 649-6814. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Watch his video column Thursday on Richmond.com. Follow him on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis on Friday at 8:45 a.m. on WCVE (88.9 FM).
Read and watch more commentary on Virginia government and politics from Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff Schapiro.