Gov. Mike Easley says he’ll ask his press staff to start treating the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina Journal like any other news media outlet from now on.
Easley said Wednesday that he has told his senior staff and spokespeople to cooperate better with the state’s news media to get information to the public.
And Easley said he’d prod them to give equal access to the Journal, which routinely gigs him, reports Matthew Eisley.
In a meeting Easley convened at the Executive Mansion with the head of the N.C. Press Association and the top editors of The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer, and the Carolina Journal, Journal Editor Richard Wagner asked the governor why his press office won’t respond to the publication’s information requests.
“It’s been reported that we were at the top of the do-not-call list,” Wagner said.
Perhaps coincidentally, the conservative Journal regularly publishes investigations critical of Easley, a Democrat, and other people in his administration.
Easley said his press office’s policy is not to respond to information requests from the Journal or other nonprofit advocacy groups, including its liberal counterpoint, N.C. Policy Watch.
Read more after the jump.
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But N&O Editor John Drescher and Beth Grace, executive director of the N.C. Press Association, stood up for the Journal.
“I certainly view them as part of the press,” Drescher told Easley. “They do a lot of good work. They’re serious about what they do. They come after us sometimes, but that’s fine.”
Grace told Easley the Journal is a full member of the press association, which admits only bona fide news organizations.
The governor asked Grace to send him a letter saying that.
“That would be helpful to me,” he told her, “and then we’ll start working on it from there.”
Grace mailed it Thursday.
Wagner said Dan Gerlach, the governor’s senior fiscal advisor, called the Journal to arrange a meeting.
“It’s definitely progress,” Wagner said today. “We’ll find out when we make our next request. There are a whole lot of things we’d like to look at.”
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Re: John Locked out no more?
The John Locke Foundation is just the press outlet for the NC repoblican party. They are not a legitiment member of the press, although they are an associate member in good standing of the Corporate Media.