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Television reporters told to stop recording in Senate hallways, prompting outcry
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post
Posted: June 18th, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/television-reporter...
Television reporters covering the Capitol were told midday Tuesday to stop recording interviews in Senate hallways, a dramatic and unexplained break with tradition that was soon reversed amid a wide rebuke from journalists, Democratic lawmakers and free-speech advocates. The episode heightened concerns about reporters access to Washington leaders in an era when hostility toward the political media has increasingly become the norm. For some, the move to protect senators from impromptu on-camera interviews fell into a wider Trump-era pattern of efforts to roll back press freedoms, whether by barring reporters from interviewing officials or denying them access to briefings, trips and events. These are actions that are without precedent in the history of the White House and Congress, said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the groups Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. Even if some of the violations are of norms rather than rights, the effect is to make the government less transparent at precisely the moment when congressional oversight has been at its weakest, Wizner said.
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