The Bachmann campaign makes no apologies for its aggressive approach to media management. | REUTERS Bachmann's bouncers: Unnecessary roughness

One staple of a Michele Bachmann campaign event is blaring Elvis Presley music. Another is a reference to her intent to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Increasingly, there is a third feature of a Bachmann appearance on the presidential trail: a staffer’s physical confrontation with a reporter.

In less than two months since entering the 2012 race, Bachmann’s campaign staff has become embroiled in at least five unusually hostile encounters with the traveling media marked by pushing, shoving and, in one instance, the allegation of a threat of violence to a reporter.


Some of it has unfolded in full public view: Bachmann aides’ tussles with the press have twice turned into news stories, once when veteran ABC News reporter Brian Ross was shoved and pushed by Bachmann staffers in South Carolina and on a second occasion when Bachmann’s husband and two staffers pushed CNN’s Don Lemon into a cart, producing a furious on-air complaint.

In another incident that did not make the air, a camera captured Fox News correspondent Steve Brown telling a bodyguard in Iowa, “Do not put your hands on me. Don’t ever do it again.”

A foreign reporter also alleged to POLITICO this week that an aide threatened to break his arm — an allegation the Bachmann campaign denied.

Friction between the press and high-profile politicians and celebrities is nothing new. But the number and intensity of incidents is unusual, particularly in Iowa, where reporters and the public are accustomed to almost unlimited access as an early state presidential ritual.

The campaign makes no apologies for its physically aggressive approach to media management, asserting that it is simply doing what it has to do to protect a popular, controversial candidate. The most aggressive aide — a tall, silver-haired man according to reporters — a spokeswoman said, is a former Secret Service agent who has guarded presidents. He and an advance woman frequently make physical contact with reporters.

“The No. 1 priority for us every single day we step out on the campaign trail is the safety and security of Michele Bachmann,” said her spokeswoman, Alice Stewart.

The retired Secret Service agent, whom she declined to name, is “extremely professional.”

“He’s guarded presidents and vice presidents and knows exactly what needs to be done,” she said. “When he gives a warning to whoever it may be, the person needs to heed the warning.”

The conduct seems authentically motivated by security concerns for the popular grass-roots candidate, who tends to draw enthusiastic crowds. But the Minnesota congresswoman isn’t the first celebrity-like figure to run for president, or the biggest. And the contentious encounters with the press has far oustripped that of other high-profile campaigns. Security guards for high-profile candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were better able to distinguish between reporters and threats.

The difference was sharply visible over the past week at the Iowa State Fair. Palin wandered the fairgrounds freely with her husband, an advance man, and, at a remove, a handful of Iowa State Police. Rick Perry was guarded by watchful Texas Rangers who gave the press and fair-goers broad latitude to talk and walk next to the governor. Bachmann, in contrast, raced through the fair in a golf cart; in a similar cart in Ames on Saturday, her bodyguard could be seen pushing away the hands of autograph-seeking supporters.

The reporter alleging that a warning crossed over into a threat is a Norwegian correspondent, Are Tagvold Flaten, who is in Iowa on a grant from the Oslo-based Freedom of Expression Foundation. He is covering the race for a Norwegian website about American politics and also wrote about the Ames Straw Poll for the conservative Norwegian Web journal Minerva (recently in the news for its editor’s pained consideration of the fact that the mass murderer Anders Breivik was among the site’s commenters).



Flaten, who said he had forgotten his press credential, said he was trying to photograph Bachmann while she talked to Fox and CNN correspondents in Ames on Sunday morning, as well as interviewing her campaign manager Ed Rollins. Flaten said he had met Bachmann earlier — she’s of Norwegian descent and of some interest to the Norwegian media — and had a friendly exchange.

On the CNN set, the silver-haired bodyguard asked Flaten, “Are you a blogger?” he said. Flaten responded that he wasn’t.

Then the guard, he said, walked away, came back and gestured toward another man: “This guy will break your arm if you take one step closer,” Flaten recalled the silver-haired guard saying.

Stewart told POLITICO she’d asked the security guard and that “he didn’t say what is alleged.”

On Aug. 8 in Council Bluffs, a camera captured the same man scuffling with Fox’s Brown as he tried to ask Bachmann a question on the way out of the event.

“You were that close. That close,” the security guard told Brown after Bachmann had boarded the bus, suggesting Brown had barely missed some unnamed punishment.

“To what?” Brown asked in response. (Brown didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.)

In another incident, Bachmann’s aides decided to deny an interview to a station, WQAD in the Quad Cities of Eastern Iowa, whose reporters’ line of questioning in an earlier interview they’d objected to.

When Chuck McClurg, a cameraman and journalist for the station, sought to record Bachmann outside her bus, he said, a female staffer put her hand over his camera’s lens and shoved it down.

“You don’t have to talk to any camera but if you’re going for the presidency of the United States, you do not place your hands on the cameras and push them — that’s just wrong,” said McClurg, who’s been covering politicians in Iowa since 1988 and had hoped to ask Bachmann how she liked Davenport. “I have never had any candidate or staff ever touch me — only shake my hands and smile and answer my few simple questions.”

Three American reporters who found the Bachmann entourage’s behavior remarkable declined to comment on the record, citing their news outlets’ strictures, fears of access and a fear of being perceived as whining. But the perception is widespread among those following her triumphant month of campaigning in Iowa.

“They’re far more aggressive than other candidates’ security,” said a veteran U.S. political reporter, noting that Bachmann’s aides made a striking contrast with the Rangers who guard Perry.

Some foreign reporters on the campaign were less concerned about perceptions of their comments, and the Norwegian Flaten wasn’t the only one to cite an unusual experience.

Jodie Newell, an Australian photographer who shoots for her own company, Newell Media, said the female advance staffer had demanded she put her camera away outside a recent Bachmann event in Indianola, Iowa, despite the fact that she was standing in an open parking lot, after she didn’t immediately produce her credentials.

Newell, a conservative who earlier had Bachmann sign a placard and wished her well, said the staffer told her, “We’ve been told on the radio to look out for you.”

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” she said, adding that the staffer refused to identify herself.

“They are being extremely heavy-handed with media,” Newell said. “I’m supportive of conservatives but I’m astounded. What they’re doing is just ridiculous and it gives them a bad name.”

CNN’s Lemon said in an email that he thought the campaign, trying to parlay the straw poll victory into an Iowa surge, may have begun to recognize that aides have crossed the line. Lemon said Rollins called him this week to apologize.

Rollins “acknowledged a problem,” Lemon said in an email. “Promised to correct. Apology accepted.”

But Stewart, Bachmann’s spokeswoman, retracted the apology in a later interview with POLITICO.

“He wasn’t apologizing for what we did,” she said of Rollins. “He said, ‘I apologize if you were offended by it.’ He stands by 100 percent the actions of our security team."