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The Ehrlich administration has taken the unusual step of banning all state officials from speaking with two Sun journalists, who they say are "failing to objectively report" on state issues.
The governor's press office sent a memo Thursday to all state public information officers and to the governor's staff ordering them to not speak with State House Bureau Chief David Nitkin or columnist Michael Olesker.
"Do not return calls or comply with any requests," press secretary Shareese N. DeLeaver wrote in the memo. The ban is in effect "until further notice."
"There's no hiding the fact of The Sun's distaste for the results of this past election," said Greg Massoni, also a press secretary to Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican. "And they are perfectly entitled to that opinion. We have a grave problem with their editorial page taking over the news division, and apparently that's what's happened."
Sun Editor Timothy A. Franklin, the top newsroom executive, called such a suggestion "ridiculous on its face." He said, "The editorial board and the newsroom are distinctly separate departments of the company, on separate floors of the building. We don't know what they're going to write about, and they don't know what we're going to write about. And that's as it should be."
Franklin said he offered Thursday to meet with Ehrlich and his press officers to go over specific complaints they have with Sun reporting, but that offer was turned down. He said Nitkin would continue to cover the State House, even though the ban will make his job more difficult.
"If they're refusing to explain their positions on issues, that's going to make it more challenging for us to balance stories," Franklin said. "But we'll find a way to talk to the administration." He said that other reporters who are not subject to the ban could ask questions of state officials for Nitkin.
Franklin added, "The thing that concerns me most is the administration trying to control the flow of news and information, and when the governor effectively says, 'I'll hand out information about state government, but only to reporters I approve of,' that's pretty scary in a democracy."
The governor's office pointed to two instances this week in which it felt Nitkin and Olesker were unfair.
In a column Tuesday, Olesker wrote that at a hearing in Annapolis last week, the governor's communications director, Paul E. Schurick, was "struggling mightily to keep a straight face" when Schurick said that political gain was "not a consideration" in making state pro-tourism commercials that feature the governor.
DeLeaver said Olesker did not attend that hearing and could not have known the expression on Schurick's face. Olesker said he did not need to be there to "know the patent absurdity of the remark" by Schurick.
"What I was clearly intending to say for any discerning reader was that the ads were clearly meant to profit the governor politically, and for anyone to say otherwise, they would have to struggle to keep from smiling," Olesker said yesterday. "Anyone past the age of elementary school could have figured that much out."
The second complaint was with a front-page map the Sun published Wednesday indicating properties across the state that were "being considered" for sale. In fact, the land shown on the map was all 450,000 acres of state-owned preservation land. A correction ran on Page 2A yesterday.
While that map appeared with an article written by Nitkin, he did not produce the map himself. Nevertheless, the governor's office said, he had some responsibility because the map ran with his story.
For a governor's office to take such an action is "highly unusual," said Bob Steele, a senior ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a journalism think tank. He said there are more productive ways for government officials to deal with disputes, such as going to senior editors with complaints.
"This ban on certain reporters, I believe, is counterproductive," Steele said. "It disservices the public. You take veteran journalists with sourcing and subject expertise and make it more difficult for them and the paper to do the job that needs to be done."
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