Effort to squelch story puts Edwards in bad light

The Edwards campaign turned a mole hill into a mountain, the faculty
adviser said.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

RALEIGH, N.C. — As a student journalist, Carla Babb hopes to work on national news — not be the subject of it.

But the tables were turned Friday for the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student when word got out that John Edwards’ presidential campaign tried to squelch her story for a campus news program.

Babb, 23, interviewed an Edwards volunteer and a campus columnist about the campaign’s headquarters in the upscale Southern Village shopping center in Chapel Hill.

She posted it on YouTube on Tuesday night. The next morning, Colleen Murray, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, called her.

“She said this sounds like it came straight from the Republican Party,” Babb said. “She was like, ‘This has to come down.’”

Babb referred Murray to her faculty adviser, C.A. Tuggle. Murray and Edwards’ communications director, Chris Kofinis, then called Tuggle. He said they asked him not to air the story and to pull it from YouTube.

Tuggle said they threatened to cut off access to Edwards for UNC reporters and other student groups if he did not pull the piece. He declined to do so.

After another UNC professor blogged about the tussle, news spread across the Internet. The video was linked to by the popular online news site The Drudge Report, and reporters for The New York Times called Babb’s home.

Tuggle said the Edwards’ campaign’s actions backfired.

“My gosh, what are they thinking?” he said. “They’re spending this much time and effort on a student newscast that has about 2,000 viewers? They’re turning a molehill into a mountain.”

The Edwards campaign would not answer questions about the tussle, but it released a statement saying it had no problem with student reporters in general.

“This is silly,” Murray said in the statement. “We love all reporters, the problem is the feeling isn’t always mutual.”

The two-and-a-half minute segment includes an interview with James Edward Dillard, a columnist for The Daily Tar Heel, saying that the location of the campaign headquarters conflicts with Edwards’ goal of reducing poverty in America.

“To pick that place as your campaign center, when you’re going to be the man who advocates on behalf of the poor, I just think, why not turn the media’s attention to somewhere where there are huge, huge problems,” he said.

Nation Hahn, an Edwards campaign volunteer and UNC student, is quoted saying that the choice of Chapel Hill over Washington, D.C., for the campaign headquarters shows that Edwards is a candidate for the average person, though the choice of Southern Village isn’t relevant to the campaign.