Tolbert: Is Pryor Campaign Pressuring Reporters To Edit Stories?

In the close, contentious, and well-funded current Senate campaign battle between Tom Cotton and Mark Pryor, every little jot and tittle of every word is subject to such scrutiny and criticism that it’s almost unbelievable.  It looks to me like an article in The National Journal this week by Emily Schultheis was a victim of this pressure.  It certainly appears someone was unhappy with the content of the story that was causing headaches for Team Pryor.

I first noticed the article in a press release from the Arkansas RNC communications director Fred Brown on Friday pointing out Pryor’s lack of credibility on the Ebola issue.

“2 Days Later, Senator Pryor’s Staff Shut Down An Interview When Ebola Was Brought Up,” wrote Brown with the RNC.  He quoted Schultheis as writing on 10/15/14 – “When I asked him two days later about the enhanced Ebola screenings at U.S. airports, an aide said my allotted interview time was up.”

But I noticed the quote lifted from the National Journal article is no longer found. When you click on the link, the article now reads, “When I asked him two days later about the enhanced Ebola screenings at U.S. airports, Pryor answered quickly as he began walking away: ‘We need to do that. We need to do that. That’s just important. This is one of those things you’ve got to really do everything you can do’.”

The portion about a campaign aide cutting off the interview short has been deleted.

“The edit was made because we went back and listened to the tape and realized the chain of events was less clear than I’d originally thought. We wanted to make sure that graph of the story was clear and accurate,” Schultheis tells me.

But Brown with the RNC had a different take. “It appears someone might have sent an angry email to the reporter and gotten a change,” said Brown when I asked him about the edit.

I asked Schultheis if there was anything to this. Specifically, I asked if the Pryor campaign put any pressure on The National Journal to review the tape and/or make this change, but the reporter declined to make further comments on the record.  She directed me to her editor, Ben Pershing, who said they are “not going to discuss our reporting or editing process.”

I don’t think it takes much to connect the dots here.

Luckily, Google has a cache of the article before the edit.  Here is a screencap below showing the change highlighted…

This is not the first time stories on Pryor have been mysteriously edited after being posted.

Last August, Emma Roller with the left leaning blog Slate posted a piece examining a book review Cotton wrote in college.  She originally included a caveat that said “Disclosure: Sen. Mark Pryor’s campaign passed along the column, asking we not say it was from the Pryor campaign.”  As I noted in a story I wrote earlier, this caveat was deleted after the story posted.

Despite the edit, the article is really an excellent piece. Schultheis does a good job looking at how the political landscape has changed for Pryor since he previously ran in 2008. Give it a read.