The American Spectator

It’s no secret that the Democratic National Convention in Boston is a big mess. Road closings are likely to shut down the city. The convention is so short on money that organizers had to cut costs by moving the media center two blocks from the FleetCenter, relying on corporate sponsors to handle much of the catering and party planning, and outsource work to out-of-state labor for things like construction and video production. Local unions are up in arms about the non-windfall of jobs, and several have threatened to picket the convention.

It’s no surprise, then, that the much-ballyhooed introduction of press credentials for bloggers should go less-than-smoothly.

I’m not a full-time employee of TAS or any other publication, and the traditional rules for press credentials prohibit freelancers. Though I don’t expect that this rule is enforced with very much rigor, I applied for press credentials under my blog anyway. What fun, I thought, to be part of the convention-blogging experiment, to play with various multimedia technology on my own site, and to have the freedom of working on my own behalf, thus not having to worry about the guilt of reporting for one publication with another publication’s press pass.

So I was happy to receive a letter in the mail confirming that my credentials had been approved. I was quite a bit less happy to receive this email the next day:

blockquote>Dear John Tabin:

Last week you were sent a credential allocation letter not properly authorized by the DNCC for press coverage of the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Upon further review of the overall site capacity at the FleetCenter, we are no longer able to issue your organization a DNCC Press Gallery Credential. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Again, we thank you for your interest in covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention and wish you well in your endeavors.

p>Sincerely, br> Francesca Gage and Michael Hurlbut br> Directors of the DNCC Press Gallery /p> /blockquote>

I found it a bit strange that my letter could be deemed “not properly authorized,” seeing as it was signed, by hand, by Ms. Gage herself.

Bill, the conservative blogger who maintains INDC Journal, got the same treatment, leading many in the blogosphere to conclude that the DNCC Press Gallery was eliminating bloggers by ideology.

Eric Schnure, one of the official DNCC bloggers, told Jay Rosen, plausibly enough, that the “vast majority of applications came from left-leaning or progressive bloggers. Therefore, the vast majority of credentialed bloggers are left-leaning and progressive. Likewise, the vast majority of bloggers who received a credential in error are also left-leaning and progressive.” I’ve found at least one lefty blogger who indeed got his credentials canceled, the self-described “unpopular and nigh-unread blogger Justin Nawrocki.”