August 24, 2012 12:07 AM UTC

Romney Campaign Shuts Down Local Reporter's Akin/Abortion Questions

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• by: Colorado Pols

FRIDAY UPDATE #2: You heard it here first, and Friday afternoon Politico confirms:

Ciara Matthews, the Romney campaign’s Colorado communications director, has been asked not to speak to the media after her decision to prohibit a reporter from asking Mitt Romney questions about abortion, sources tell POLITICO…

A spokesperson with the Romney campaign told POLITICO yesterday that the campaign did not prohbit questions, and other networks said that their questions were not influenced by the campaign. “This is not how we operate,” the spokesperson said. “The matter is being addressed.”

Politico lists prior jobs for Ciara Matthews with Scott Walker’s campaign in Wisconsin and Sharron Angle’s Senate campaign. In addition, Ms. Matthews’ resume includes a stint with Marilyn Musgrave’s Susan B. Anthony Fund, a stridently anti-abortion activist group.

So it’s possible that Ms. Matthews’ connection to Musgrave and the Susan B. Anthony Fund might explain her allegedly self-driven desire to censor questions about Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin and abortion in general. But we’re still not sure, given the Romney campaign’s history with reporter Shaun Boyd and the obvious political problems with the Akin story. After Boyd’s grilling of Romney back in may, this would surely have been a reporter his Colorado operatives would have been watching out for.

We’ll be watching to see what happens to Ms. Matthews: wherever she ends up next will help answer if she genuinely violated policy, or simply made the mistake of not being subtle enough.

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FRIDAY UPDATE: The Washington Post sheds some light on this story today:

And in a wide-ranging interview late Thursday night, Boyd provided further substantiation for the campaign’s claims. Boyd says that the conditions were the work of a state-level Romney staffer in Colorado [Pols emphasis] and that, from all indications, that staffer was acting independently of official Romney campaign guidance…

In her exchanges with the conditions-imposing staffer, Boyd tried appealing to common sense. After learning that she couldn’t ask questions about the sensitive topics, Boyd responded, “Everybody’s talking about this, and I can’t talk about it? It’s going to look weird…It’s not going to look good for you.” Too, Boyd wasn’t intending to ask per se about abortion but rather about how Romney had asked Akin to give up his Senate campaign and had been defied.

The primary miscalculation of the staffer, suggests Boyd, was in supposing that the insistence on conditions would remain bottled up. “When the stipulation was made, I think the staffer didn’t think I’d tell everybody,” she says. The stipulation wasn’t communicated off the record, says Boyd, who announced to the whole world at the very beginning of her story that she’d been prevented from discussing abortion and Akin.

After the incident went national, Boyd spoke with a national campaign staffer, who asked why Boyd hadn’t appealed the matter to them. She said she responded that she didn’t think such an approach would get her anywhere.

The rumor making the circuit this morning is that the “state-level” Romney staffer in question is Ciara Matthews, the communications director for the campaign in Colorado. We obviously can’t confirm that without Shaun Boyd’s help, but if this truly was the error the campaign is claiming it was, we expect the staffer’s identity will be confirmed soon enough.

Also, the Huffington Post video we posted yesterday appears to have been removed. Click here to watch the original report from CBS4.

Talking Points Memo:

Denver TV reporter Shaun Boyd wanted to ask Mitt Romney about Todd Akin and the abortion controversy roiling the GOP Thursday. But the Romney campaign refused…

Boyd told TPM that the Romney campaign offered her station an interview with Romney, one of several local news hits in swing states that Romney conducted via satellite Thursday. A campaign staffer who’s name she didn’t divulge told her what questions she wasn’t allowed to ask.

“They said, you know, ‘the only stipulation is we don’t want you talking about the Akin issue,'” Boyd recalled. She also said the Romney staffer told her the campaign didn’t want questions for Romney about ‘the whole abortion controversy.'” [Pols emphasis]

Boyd said she resisted.

“I said to them, ‘Look everybody’s talking about this. It’s going to seem awkward if I don’t ask about it,'” she said. “And they said, ‘Well he’s said all he’s going to say about it. He doesn’t have anything more to say, you won’t be getting any new information so we don’t want to talk about that.'”

“It was pretty clear: ‘Here’s our one stipulation,'” she recalled.

You’ll recall that CBS4 reporter Shaun Boyd filmed an interview with Mitt Romney back in May, where she very commendably drove home the tough questions on topics Romney didn’t want to discuss. It’s at least as commendable for Boyd to go on the air after today’s interview and disclose the topics that Romney’s campaign took off the table before the interview even started. Had she not, we might be writing a post criticizing Boyd for not asking the GOP’s presidential nominee about the biggest political story in America when she had a wide-open chance.

The fact is, presidential campaigns wield tremendous power in their ability to grant (or exclude) access to reporters. Reporters need access to do their jobs effectively, making confrontation a delicate task. There’s little doubt that the pre-emptive conditions imposed on Shaun Boyd are being imposed on reporters all across the nation. It’s not that the latest controversy over the GOP and abortion is abating, they’re using all their influence to manufacture that impression.

But it didn’t work this time. And now, once again, the omission is the story.