Ethics Newsline®

JACKSON, Mississippi
The U.S. Marshal’s Service last week insisted that it did nothing wrong when it controversially seized two reporters’ recordings of a speech given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Mississippi.

Scalia was in Mississippi to give two speeches on the Constitution. While he usually allows reporters to attend and take notes, he routinely bars the visual or audio recording of his remarks.

After Scalia did not announce his normal ban on taping at the second of two speeches last week, two journalists — one from the Associated Press, one from a local newspaper — recorded his comments.

Afterwards, deputy federal marshal Melanie Rube demanded that the reporters erase the speech. When the AP reporter refused, Rube seized the recording and erased it — as she also did to the local reporter’s tape.

The U.S. Marshal’s Office last week defended its actions, saying it was simply upholding Scalia’s longstanding policy against allowing himself to be recorded, reported the Associated Press.

“Our reporter was strictly using a recorder to make sure she got what he [Scalia] had to say correct,” Ron Harrist, news editor of the AP’s Jackson bureau, told the Washington Post.

AP Mississippi bureau chief Frank Fisher said the government “crossed the line” by confiscating the journalists’ recordings when no ban was announced beforehand.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press last week released a letter asking for Rube to be disciplined for her actions, which the group said violated the U.S. Privacy Protection Act, which bans government officers from seizing materials headed for press, according to the AP.

A similar controversy occurred earlier that same day after Scalia ordered local TV reporters to leave a reception sponsored by William Carey College, where he had given a speech. A college official later overturned a Scalia-imposed ban on photos by news reporters after non-press guests started snapping shots themselves.

“I specifically asked for protocol and was told that the media would have access to Justice Scalia during the reception,” William Carey spokeswoman Jeanna Graves told the AP. Graves, who later sent an apology to the media, said she was “embarrassed and angry” over the incident.