Edwards' Campaign Demands Student Journalist Yank Story From YouTube

A UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor said John Edwards' Presidential campaign tried to kill a student's video story about his campaign headquarters. Associate Professor C.A. Tuggle said two top staffers for the former North Carolina senator demanded that the school drop the segment from the student-run television program "Carolina Week." They also asked to have the video removed from the YouTube Web site. Tuggle said they threatened to cut off access to Edwards for UNC student reporters and other student groups if the piece aired. "My gosh, what are they thinking?" Tuggle said. "They're spending this much time and effort on a student newscast that has about 2,000 viewers? They're turning a molehill into a mountain." A spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign said it had no problem with student reporters. "This is silly," campaign spokeswoman Colleen Murray said in a statement. "We love all reporters, the problem is the feeling isn't always mutual." The campaign would not answer questions about the incident. The segment, by graduate student Carla Babb, began as a look at Nation Hahn, a UNC senior interning with the campaign. During the interview, Babb asked about a recent column in The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper, criticizing Edwards' choice of the posh Southern Village shopping center as the location for his headquarters.Babb rewrote the piece to focus on that angle and interviewed the columnist, prompting the complaint from Edwards' campaign. In the video, James Edward Dillard, a columnist for The Daily Tar Heel, says that the location conflicts with Edwards' campaign goal of reducing poverty in America. "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 said. On the other side, Hahn is quoted saying that the choice of Chapel Hill over Washington, D.C., shows that Edwards is a candidate for the average person. "Frankly, Chapel Hill is a relatively affluent area, period, so I don't know where they would rather him place his headquarters," he said.UNC student Carla BabbTuggle, who has overseen the "Carolina Week" news program for eight years and previously worked as a television reporter in Florida, said that it is not uncommon for the focus of a piece to shift during reporting. What made this case unusual, he said, was the decision to post it on YouTube before broadcast. Babb posted the piece to the popular online video-sharing site Tuesday to meet the deadline for an MTV "Choose or Lose" news contest. Despite the complaints, Tuggle said the piece will air as scheduled on Monday and will remain on YouTube.