One of the great perks of living in DC is that, when you decide to host an informative Health Care House Party for OFA, you sometimes find a national correspondent from Fox News showing up at your doorstep and have the sublime pleasure of turning them away. Such is the case for one small house party I attended this week.
I'm the co-chair of a neighborhood team for DC for Obama. My counterpart and her roommate were gracious enough to open their home to host a Health Care House Party to gear up for the national day of service on June 27, and brainstorm ways to affect positive change in our own neighborhood of Capitol Hill. En route to the gathering, wine in tow, all fired up on health care hopes, I get a frantic text message from our hostess:
"it's *** call me asap"
I call her back, a block away and figuring that she just wants me to grab something for our meeting, but she tells me that Fox News is in her house with a camera crew already set up. She explains that she had gotten a quick heads up by way of OFA that Fox News had contacted them, and that OFA tried to discourage them from coming, but that the decision would ultimately be up to us as to whether or not we would allow them to film our meeting.
What happened was that a woman correspondent and a camera man showed up at her doorstep, with their press badges on but no gear with them. Thinking they were just hill staffers just there to join and not press, our hostess invited them in. That is when the Fox News team identified themselves as such and proceeded to bring in a camera and spotlight. Our hostess is a very media-savvy woman and asked if they could clarify what kind of footage they were looking for. Were they going to be "b-rolling" and just taking video footage, or were they looking for interviews? Apparently that is when the Fox News Team asked her if she wanted to be mic'd.
Our hostess immediately declined, trying to explain that we weren't expecting them, we weren't prepared, let alone the fact that our attendees had no idea they might be on camera. She said I'd be along shortly, and might be able to add clarification. At which point she got away to send me the frantic text message and ask me to play the "bad cop".
"I'm Midwestern, I felt I had to be nice to them! Can you kick them out? They're already set up."
Sure enough, when I walked in the camera man pointed right at me, and the spotlight was set up in the living room, and the Fox News correspondent was chit-chatting with one of our guests.
I put on my best polite Wisconsin smile and introduced myself. I told the correspondent that, while the event was listed on barackobama.com, we did not intend it to be open to the press, that we had no prior knowledge of their attendance, and I did not anticipate that our guests would feel comfortable talking about such a sensitive topic on the record.
Of course, the correspondent whipped out a few names of people from DC for Obama, and OFA claiming that they had obtained permission to attend. Honestly, though, the contacts at OFA had all of 15 minutes with which to notify us before they just showed up, and we were in no way in contact with them regarding the planning of the event (until of course they gave us as much warning as they could).
To that, we cordially suggested they get back in contact with those same people and perhaps they could attend another event or that other hosts would be willing to open up to them.
All in all, I would say it took a good 20 minutes of me going back and forth with the Fox News team before they finally agreed to leave. I don’t know how long it was between when they'd ambushed our host and when I got there, but it was definitely already tense in the room when I showed up. But, all's well that ends well. They did leave, and got zero footage from us.
We win! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.