Andrew Sullivan notes that in both instances in which crowds have shouted “kill him” (as opposed to “bomb Obama” or “off with his head”) only one reporter heard it. Republicans have argued that this makes the accounts suspect, as in the second case the Secret Service was unable to find a second witness.
Dana Milbank, one of those reporters, points out that the Secret Service has been making the job of identifying such people extremely difficult.
I have to say the Secret Service is in dangerous territory here. In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they’ve started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty — protecting the protectee — and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it’s unfounded because the reporters can’t get close enough to identify the person.
Palin has, in outrageous fashion, refused to make herself available to the press, and now the McCain campaign has enlisted the Secret Service in protecting their campaign from scrutiny. Even if Palin didn’t have a record of ethics violations and abuse of power this would be unacceptable, but as it stands this behavior is downright undemocratic.
In my view, the Secret Service preventing reporters from interviewing people at rallies is almost certainly an example of prior restraint, and therefore might be illegal. It would be one thing if these people refused to talk to the media, it is another thing entirely when Secret Service detail assigned to protect Palin prevents reporters from doing their jobs. Media organizations might consider filing charges a violation of their responsibility to cover politics objectively, but my argument would be the violation of the public trust here is so egregious that not doing something about this violates their commitment to providing the kind of information Americans need to be free and self-governing.
–A. Serwer
