Joe Biden keeps the press in the closet

Freedom of the press? Not if you’re in a closet, Florida reporter notes
Original Post: NY Post

By CATHY BURKE

A Florida political reporter says he was consigned to a crowded, stuffy closet to wait out the arrival of Vice President Joe Biden at a $500-a-pop fundraiser — calling the 75-minute confinement "awkward" and a "stupid" attempt to keep him from mingling at the event.

"First off, it was a bad thing that they wouldn’t let me interact with other guests," 11-year Orlando Sentinel newspaper veteran Scott Powers, 51, told The Post today.

"It was silly and stupid and it annoyed the hell out of me. And second, it was a highly inappropriate and demeaning place to put someone.

"They told me, ‘you wait in here until the vice president comes, and every time I stuck my head out, they’d say, ‘he’s not here yet.’

"I guess they didn’t want me to get any state secrets."

The closet caper occurred last Wednesday, when Biden visited the Winter Park, Fla., home of developer and philanthropist Alan Ginsburg.

Some 150 guests were invited to the pricey function, and helped themselves to a nice buffet while Powers was stuck inside the crowded storage closet stuffed with furniture.

"It was a stupid room they picked," he scoffed.

Powers said he was offered some food while he was stuck in the closet — "I never accept food at functions," he said.

He said he also was told he was free to use the bathroom close by. "I could hear the guests go in and out, the flushing," he said. "It wasn’t like I was locked in."

When Biden showed up, Powers said he was escorted to the room for a speech and offered a chair.

"You’re not going to see much with people standing in front of you, so I stood up, held my recorder up in the air with one hand and wrote notes with the other hand," he said.

Afterward, Powers said he got an effusive apology from the home owner.

"He said he had no idea that the VP’s team put me in his closet," Powers said. "It was a nice apology, gracious."

But Biden’s press secretary’s email later "was something less than heartfelt," Powers said.

"It was one or two sentences, like, sorry it happened to you," he said.

Powers said he took a picture of his confines while he waited out the Biden speech, and his editor posted the picture with the comment about the "life of the reporter is not always easy."

"The following morning we ran that blog post picture in our paper," he said. "Am I suing? No. Frankly I’ve been treated badly at other events. I’m over it."

A spokeswoman for Biden said it was standard policy to provide "hold rooms" for pool reporters covering events, though such rooms "should not be a storage room. This was the unfortunate mistake of an inexperienced staffer and the Vice President's office has made sure it will never happen again."

The spokeswoman, Elizabeth Alexander, also said she "made an unequivocal apology to the reporter after I was made aware of the situation on Wednesday afternoon ... The reporter thanked me for the apology and said that it was accepted."