Edwards camp reacts to video

Chapel Hill got an unexpected taste of presidential campaign hardball last week when John Edwards' presidential campaign demanded that a UNC broadcast journalism graduate student remove her story about the candidate's headquarters from YouTube.

The story, which will air on television this evening, focused on the location of the campaign's headquarters in the affluent Chapel Hill neighborhood of Southern Village.

C.A. Tuggle, news director for the "Carolina Week" television program, said that when journalism graduate student Carla Babb declined to remove her story from the popular Web site, the campaign contacted him and made the same demand in several phone calls.

"They said access for all campus media was certainly in jeopardy, and even their relationship with anybody from the University was in jeopardy," he said. "They mentioned a potential ban on speaking appearances."

Edwards has made quite a few appearances on campus, both as a law student during the '70s and during his recent stint as director of the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

Tuggle said that the campaign complained that Babb had misrepresented herself to get access to campaign headquarters and was unfair to Edwards. The campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

The story was produced for the "Carolina Week" program and will air at 5 p.m. today on campus television, but it was posted online early in order to meet the deadline for an MTV reporting contest.

Babb said she was shocked by the campaign's response.

The two-and-a-half minute clip features UNC senior Nation Hahn, an Edwards campaign volunteer, and UNC senior James Edward Dillard, a columnist for The Daily Tar Heel. The piece originally focused on Hahn, but Babb changed the angle in the process of her reporting to include Dillard's perspective when she heard students on campus discussing a column he had written criticizing the location of Edwards' headquarters.

"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," Dillard says in the video.

But Hahn said Edwards' choice, announced December 2006, to locate the headquarters in Chapel Hill instead of Washington, D.C., makes him a candidate for the average person.

"His work on the issues shows his commitment to poverty, not where his headquarters is located or where his house is located or anything like that," Hahn says in the video.

Tuggle showed the piece to faculty at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Thursday morning, without telling them at first about the controversy.

"Everyone I've shown it to thought it was fair and balanced," he said.

Jean Folkerts, dean of the journalism school, agreed that the report was fair to the campaign.

"I think it was a situation in which a person reacted with too much sensitivity to the issue and momentarily lost sight of the fact that this story was not going to be a major issue for the campaign."

The clip had fewer than 200 views on YouTube early Thursday afternoon, before journalism professor Leroy Towns broke the news of the dispute late that afternoon on his journalism school blog. The story was picked up on political blogs, including the influential Drudge Report, and other news outlets on Friday night. As of 7 p.m. Sunday, the clip had been viewed 143,766 times.

The dispute highlights the occasionally heavy-handed approach campaigns use on the media - a process that usually takes place out of public view. The Clinton campaign used a similar tactic against men's magazine GQ earlier this fall threatening to revoke press access to Bill Clinton. A planned article on his wife's campaign never appeared in the magazine, though neither the campaign nor the publication confirmed the reason.

Towns, who worked for more than 20 years as chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the campaign took an innocuous report and made it into a national story.

"You quickly learn in the business of politics that reporters are very independent creatures and telling them to kill a story causes big problems."

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.