Photo by David Weigel

One of the credentialed reporters is no less than Joseph Basel, one of the four activists who was arrested — and let out on bail — for the mysterious botched sting of Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) office. “I’m here for myself,” Basel told me, after chatting with Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit and Andrew Breitbart of Big Government.

Organizers say that journalists without passes will not be allowed into the convention at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. (A Star Tribune request for a pass was denied, the paper’s interest in covering its home-state congresswoman notwithstanding).

Convention spokesman Judson Phillips informs us that most of the sessions are closed “at the request” of the presenters. “Given the media interest, I don’t want the sessions disrupted and overrun with the media,” he said.

This really is unusual. As a journalist, I’ve been allowed into sessions, dinners, everything at conferences hosted by the Eagle Forum and by Focus on the Family. Extra credit to Eagle Forum here — when I was covering the How to Take Back America Conference in St. Louis, Phyllis Schlafly’s son Andy, an organizer, invited me away from my media seat and into a seat at his dinner table to chat with more activists. And some of the most controversial speakers at the National Tea Party Convention, like Rick Scarborough, happily chatted with me inside and outside of their sessions at previous events.

One major implication of this, of course, is that for the third time since the presidential election — the first at a speech in China, the second at a speech for a pro-life group in Indiana — Sarah Palin will give a political speech that members of the media are not allowed to attend. According to co-sponsors I’ve spoken with, they, not journalists, will get to spend time with Palin before and after the speech.

UPDATE: Here’s the rejection email.

Thank you for your inquiry about media coverage of the First National Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

This is a working convention and the sessions will not be open to the press. We are planning two events that the media could have access to. Neither has been finalized. One would be on Friday and the other would be on Saturday.

We have a very limited number of press passes and they have been accounted for. Press without a pass will not be allowed into the convention area.

If you want to interview any of our speakers, please let me know and we will try to work that out.  Governor Palin will not be available for interviews.

If you wish to interview someone about the convention, please email me, Judson@Teapartynation.com and I will try to work out arrangements for that.

He’ll try!

But there’s much more, as Marcy Wheeler hones in on. Check out this letter from George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, shortly after the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by extremists in Pakistan. Tenet tells the group that Pearl was not a CIA asset or operative. But then he declines to issue a firm denial that the agency is not having its assets or operatives pose as journalists. “A blanket statement that we would never use journalistic cover would, I know, be preferable to the members of ASNE,” Tenet writes. “The kinds of people who kidnap and murder reporters like Daniel Pearl, however, are unlikely to believe a policy statement by the U.S. government no matter how firmly it is made.”

So Tenet hides behind Omar Saeed Shaikh, Pearl’s most likely murderer. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession to killing Pearl is rather dubious.) As someone who occasionally reports from war zones, I don’t appreciate the non-denial denial of something that could endanger my life. It’s one thing to say that fanatics won’t believe the denial. It’s quite another not to issue it for that — alleged — reason.

Then on Monday, Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon contracted the Rendon Group — a public relations firm that had made millions from the CIA by “creat[ing] the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power” in the media, according to an award-winning Rolling Stone profile — to vet embed-seeking journalists for “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” coverage according to “mission objectives.” For any media organization that can’t afford the several thousand dollars every day for security and transportation in war zones — most of them, basically — that’s, uh, problematic. I’ve embedded in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There were many places in both countries where unembedded reporting by American journalists is a life-or-death gamble.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan told the paper that the only vetting that takes place isn’t for utility to the war effort but for responsibility. “If it’s accurate, that’s a successful news story, whether good or bad,” Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said. But today the paper quoted new documents from Rendon showing that not only does the vetting take place, but so does a discussion of strategies to manipulate reporters:

One reporter on the staff of one of America’s pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as “neutral to positive” in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes “could possibly be neutralized” by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials.

Another reporter, from a TV station, provides coverage from a “subjective angle,” according to his Pentagon profile. Steering him toward covering “the positive work of a successful operation” could “result in favorable coverage.”

To some degree, it’s hard to get exercised by the fact that public-affairs officers try to sway journalists’ coverage. Shocking, I tell you! But denying that it occurs at all is bizarre, and the question becomes whether certain journalists are denied their embeds based on the effort. One Stars and Stripes reporter, Heath Druzen, was kicked out of an embed in Iraq earlier this year after Druzen didn’t highlight developments that the brigade he was with wanted highlighted.

Then there’s this clever bit of argumentative jujitsu:

In a statement e-mailed to Stars and Stripes, Rear Adm. Greg Smith, director of communications for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, wrote: “To imply journalists embedded with our forces only serve to highlight positive aspects of our mission slights the professional journalists who regularly embed with our forces and report what they experience, both good and bad.”

Somehow it doesn’t seem plausible to argue that Stars and Stripes is slandering its colleagues who make it past a questionable embed vetting process. Will Stars and Stripes, a paper available in most every dining hall in Iraq and Afghanistan, be denied further embeds?

[T]hroughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Allen follows up today by … quoting Cheney again.

Cheney maintains that records released this week show that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques “provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda” after the Sept. 11 attacks. A Democratic official disputed that assertion …

This is pretty amazing. Cheney claimed that confidential documents would back up his case. The documents were released, but didn’t back up his case. The result? “He-said, she-said” stories that don’t point out the crucial fact of Cheney’s deception.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

Because why should reporters enjoy the first and fourth amendment protections the constitution entitles us to? Reporters who don’t talk to confidential sources have nothing to worry about, right? Seriously, calm down. This stuff happens in Moscow all the time.

The ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson comments:

“Reporters have every right to be alarmed,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “There are many ways for the government to legally get reporters’ records, even if they have done nothing wrong. Through criminal provisions, the PATRIOT Act and the newly-expanded FISA law, communication records are fair game. Unfortunately for reporters, changing cell phones won’t make a difference – only changing the law will.”

Here at The Washington Independent, we recently had a system-wide phone malfunction. Hmmm.

Update: I should have specified that the ABC News piece quoted above is two and a half years old. But still! The principle is the same.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported an audience member at a rally in Clearwater, Fla., featuring Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin hurled a racial epithet at a television crew’s African-American soundman.

At a Palin rally at Elon University in North Carolina yesterday, Joe Killian, a reporter for the Greensboro [N.C.] News-Record reported being physically assaulted by a McCain supporter. From Killian’s blog:

After the speech was over, I was walking around getting peoples’ reactions to it when I wandered into several clusters of sign-waving Obama supporters outside the stadium area. They were surrounded by McCain-Palin folks, and both sides were yelling at each other.

I sidled up to one of the Obama supporters and asked why they were there, what they were trying to accomplish.

As he was telling me, a large, bearded man in full McCain-Palin campaign regalia got in his face to yell at him.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “I’m trying to interview him. Just a minute, okay?”

The man began to say something about how of course I was interviewing the Obama people when suddenly, from behind us, the sound of a pro-Obama rap song came blaring out of the windows of a dorm building. We all turned our heads to see Obama signs in the windows.

This was met with curses, screams and chants of “U.S.A” by McCain-Palin folks, who crowded under the windows trying to drown it out and yell at the person playing the stereo.

It was a moment of levity in an otherwise very tense situation and so I let out a gentle chuckle and shook my head.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.

And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

Perhaps, much like Sen. John McCain had to remind supporters that Sen. Barack Obama is a “decent person,” the McCain campaign may want to inform event attendees that there is probably no surer way to draw negative press than by physically attacking reporters.

(Via Politico’s Ben Smith)