This is an amazing story.
Obama was heckled this week at a town hall meeting in Ohio, which is not an unusual occurrence. there are a lot of assholes in the world.
What's amazing is that the person doing the heckling was a credentialed member of the press.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was beginning a town-hall style meeting at Baldwin-Wallace College when John Quinn, a freelance photographer on assignment for Bloomberg News, interrupted him by calling on him to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Senator Obama went along and led the crowd through the pledge.
Mr. Quinn subsequently refused to give his name to other journalists in the press pen. A video of the incident shows Mr. Quinn shoving his hand into camera lenses, shouting at other reporters, and responding to requests for his name and press affiliation by saying, “I was speaking as John Q. Public.”
“Nobody wants to honor the flag,” Mr. Quinn says in the video. “I had to speak up.”
Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, said today that the agency took no action because “this guy was a credentialed member of the press. He has every right to his freedom of speech.” If Mr. Quinn had threatened or advanced toward Mr. Obama, the situation would have been handled differently, Mr. Wiley said.
Bloomberg confirmed that this guy was working for them and that “there are no more assignments scheduled.”
Well, I should hope so.
Freelancers are becoming more common these days as newspapers downsize and turn to contract workers to get things done. And you can't always be certain who you are getting.
But you have to be more careful than this. And if you do end up hiring someone with no professionalism, the least you can do is apologize.