RALEIGH – A long-running dispute over control of hydroelectric plants, lakefront property, and the flow of the Yadkin River mutated last week into a momentous test of the freedom of the press in North Carolina.
It’s a test that most state politicians, Democrats and Republicans, failed miserably.
Sen. Fletcher Hartsell is a Republican who maintains close ties with the Democratic majority and thus chairs a Senate judiciary committee. Hartsell has been a key supporter of a plan for the state to assume control of four dams and some 38,000 acres of land owned by Alcoa in Davidson, Davie, Montgomery, Rowan, and Stanly counties.
I don’t much like the state’s takeover plan, which will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and accomplish no public purpose of which I am aware. Alcoa sells the dams’ power on the open market, pays local property taxes, and operates under regulations as any other owner would.
But you don’t have to share my concerns about the Left’s Alcoa-bashing to condemn Hartsell’s high-handed tactics. Last week, his committee issued subpoenas to UNC-TV reporter Eszter Vajda and general manager Tom Howe demanding that they immediately turn over “all footage (including all interviews, B-roll and camera masters) in your possession regarding the Alcoa Corporation’s activities in Stanly County.”
Hartsell knew that UNC-TV had done reporting on the Alcoa controversy because he had been interviewed for it. But since the station had yet to run its stories on its program “North Carolina Now” and the 2010 legislative session was about to end, Hartsell apparently feared that the stories would come too late to call attention to his takeover bill. So he engineered the seizure of UNC-TV’s unaired stories and supporting materials, intending to show them to his colleagues and the public on Tuesday morning. (Clumsily, the committee convened as scheduled but proved unprepared to show the DVDs until a few hours later.)
If you thought that the prospect of a legislative committee issuing commands to a supposedly independent news organization would provoke widespread outrage and condemnation, you were wrong.
Some capitol reporters were, indeed, bothered by the actions of Hartsell and his colleagues. The national organization for statehouse reporters, CapitolBeat, issued a statement condemning the subpoenas. (The group’s president, Laura Leslie, is the capitol bureau chief for WUNC-FM.) But by and large, the media reaction has been surprisingly tame.
As for other North Carolina politicians, they either ducked the issue or sided with Hartsell. Among them was Gov. Beverly Perdue, whose office told Carolina Journal that the operating principle here was government transparency. Because UNC-TV is a state-owned station, her press office insisted that “any information deemed to be a public record would be turned over.”
For its part, UNC-TV caved almost immediately. Not only did it turn over everything Hartsell’s committee demanded, but it then scheduled the Alcoa stories for broadcast on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings. Did the station schedule these stories to run this week in an attempt to placate Hartsell and render the controversy moot? Seems likely to me.
That is, of course, the point. I assume that if the legislature had subpoenaed a private TV station to obtain access to reporting not yet aired, the backlash would have been blistering. But because UNC-TV is a state agency, an arm of the university system, some apparently think its newsroom is deserving of less protection from the encroachment of political bullies.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable reading of existing law. It’s also a dangerous precedent. It threatens the independence not only of public television but also of public radio and student-run newspapers on UNC campuses.
My preferred solution would be to privatize UNC-TV – move its operations and assets into a nonprofit, which is the way public TV operates in other states and the model used by, for example, The Daily Tar Heel in Chapel Hill. In the meantime, North Carolina politicians and journalists of all stripes should snap to attention, unite as one voice, and tell Fletcher Hartsell and his Senate colleagues that their thuggish tactics will not be tolerated in a free society.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.