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VARIOUS DATELINES
A university journalism professor from North Carolina says that officials from the presidential campaign of former Sen. John Edwards tried to kill a story prepared for a student newscast.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the flap centers on a story, prepared for the newscast and circulated on the Web, questioning whether it was appropriate for Edwards to base his operations in an affluent part of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when one of his main campaign themes is fighting poverty.

University of North Carolina broadcast journalism professor Charles Tuggle says Edwards’s campaign demanded that he pull the story, which was prepared by graduate student Carla Babb.

Tuggle told local television station WITN that the Edwards campaign charged that the student reporter had misrepresented the purpose of the story.

According to the Washington Post, a campaign spokeswoman would not comment on Tuggle’s accusation other than to label it as “silly.”

“Was it what the campaign was expecting it to be? No. But I don’t know that we’re obligated as journalists to tell that the focus of a story has changed,” Tuggle told the Associated Press.

In another journalism-ethics story from last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was blasted by reporters and the White House for holding a news conference that was actually staffed by FEMA employees asking suspiciously soft questions of the agency’s deputy director as he was quizzed about the response to the California wildfires. What initially appeared to be a successful event in the administration’s effort to prove it could efficiently respond to a disaster turned sour, reports the Los Angeles Times, when the agency admitted it had used employees to ask the questions when no actual reporters showed up for the hastily arranged news conference.

FEMA officials said the incident reflected a “lapse in judgment,” but denied that there was an intent to deceive.

On Monday, the FEMA official who staged last week’s phony press conference felt further heat after a pending job offer was revoked, notes the AP.