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Blogging Congress: Technological Change and the Politics of the Congressional Press Galleries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Michael T. Heaney
Michael T. Heaney
Affiliation:
2007–2008 APSA Congressional Fellow
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Extract

New media historically have had difficulty obtaining access to the U. S. Congress. As technological changes have shifted the competitive balance among news organizations, the more established media have traditionally fought back by attempting to exclude the upstarts from the corridors of power. For example, Associate Senate Historian Donald Ritchie (1991) recounts the struggle by radio to gain a foothold against the opposition of entrenched newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. The newspaper-controlled Standing Committee of Correspondents, which was responsible for granting credentials to the Capitol Hill Press Gallery, refused to credential radio reporters unless they also worked for newspapers. The dispute was finally settled in 1939 when Congress created a separate Radio Gallery, making Congress “the only national legislature to divide its galleries among different forms of media” (Ritchie 1991, 217).I thank Jeffrey Biggs and Jerry Gallegos for helpful suggestions. Generous financial support for this research was provided by the Congressional Fellowship Program of the American Political Science Association.

Type
ASSOCIATION NEWS
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 422 - 426
Copyright
© 2008 The American Political Science Association

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