-By Warner Todd Huston
The office of the Vice President issued an apology to a University of Maryland student for staffers having forcefully deleted photographs the young man took of Biden at a public event.
Jeremy Barr, a student reporter for University of Maryland’s Capital News Service, attended Biden’s announcement of another new domestic violence initiative but sat in a section meant for the general audience, not reporters. The reporter was seen taking photos of the Vice President speaking from the podium. After the speech, he was confronted by a Biden staffer who demanded that he delete the photos and stood by making sure he did so.
In short order, Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, filed a formal complaint with Biden’s office.
Biden’s office claimed it was all a mistake by an over zealous staffer.
Insisting the Biden’s office has a policy of “open press events,” Biden spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said that it was just an “unfortunate mistake” made by a staffer “who does not regularly interact with the press.”
“Once we learned about it I immediately apologized to the Dean of the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, the reporter involved and to the newspaper. It will never happen again,” Barkoff said
Dean Dalglish said the action was “clearly illegal,” but was satisfied with the immediate apology.
“Somebody really screwed up. The vice president’s office probably knows that it’s illegal and certainly knows that it was a stupid thing to do,” Dalglish said.
Last March, Biden’s staff was criticized for stuffing a journalist from the Orlando Sentinel in a closet during a Democrat fundraiser he was attempting to cover.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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