First, a batch of top-tier Republican prospects -- including Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee – decided to sit out tomorrow night’s GOP presidential primary debate, co-sponsored by Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Party.

And now, major media organizations are sitting it out too.

The Associated Press announced Wednesday night that it’s not going to cover tomorrow night’s Republican presidential debate, citing “restrictions placed on media access.”



“The debate sponsors, Fox News Channel and the South Carolina Republican Party, will only allow photos to be taken in the moments ahead of the debate and not during the event itself,” the AP said in an advisory to editors.



“These are restrictions that violate basic demands of news-gathering and differ from other debates where more access was granted. Accordingly, the AP will not staff the event in any format nor will the AP disseminate any pool photos taken by another outlet.”

The AP said the decision was “consistent with longstanding policy” in coverage of events like these, and would be reassessed “should access conditions change.”

Reuters confirmed that it would not be covering the event photographically, because it shared concerns about access. However, Reuters did not confirm whether it would be going as far as AP and not filing text either.

“This is about whether visual journalists will be treated with the same respect that text journalists are treated,” said Michael Oreskes, AP’s managing editor for U.S. News. “The public has a right to see presidential candidates as well as to read about them, and we think this debate should get off on the right foot.”

Oreskes said the AP found out Tuesday about restrictions that would bar photographers from taking photos throughout the length of the debate, and informed the South Carolina Republican Party that this was unacceptable.

“At this event four years ago, both Reuters and the Associated Press had wide access for our still photographers during the debate,” he said.

But Joel Sawyer, the executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, says that’s simply not so.

“This is the same way every debate sponsored by Fox and the South Carolina GOP has operated in the past,” Sawyer said. “This is not about us changing the rules of the game. It’s a matter of the AP changing the rules of the game. The AP has said if they are not able to sit in for the entire debate, they’re not going to cover it period. And frankly, we are not interested in the AP trying to bully us.”

In past debates, photographers have been able to shoot some portion of the debate, either at the beginning or at the end, but not sit through the entire debate.

“No photographer has sat for the entirety of the Fox News-South Carolina GOP debate in the past,” he said.

Katon Dawson, the former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, oversaw the two previous debates leading up to the 2008 election, and remembers no such problems in the past.

He could not recall the exact rules that were given to the photographers, but said many of the circumstances this time around were different. ‘We had a lot bigger staff, and we had 10 candidates,” he said. “They’d been campaigning for 8 months. We had a professional photographer that provided something for them [the news organizations].

While he said “no one took photos throughout the entire debates,” he has gone back and seen Reuters and AP photos of the past South Carolina GOP debates taken by AP and Reuters, so there must have been at least some photography during the event.

During the first debate, held in May of 2007 at the Koger Center for the Arts, the venue had a booth for professional performances that Fox News wasn’t using, so he said “we may well have put the photographers in there.”

*This post has been updated to include Reuters's decision and comment from AP, the South Carolina Republican Party and its former chairman.

UPDATE: AP spokesman Paul Colford said a check of AP photo files revealed that the organization shot more than 80 pictures from the second South Carolina GOP debate of the 2008 election cycle, held in January of that year, and that several of the photos show candidates behind podiums gesturing as they answered questions during the debate.

“That’s a far cry from what they offered us yesterday, which is a pool photographer for the handshakes before the start,” he said.

UPDATE II: AP sent out an advisory Thursday evening indicating that their position hadn't changed, saying, "We anticipate a text political story tonight based on interviews with the candidates in South Carolina on the death of Osama bin Laden. Should debate access conditions change, the AP will reassess this decision and expedite a coverage advisory if warranted."