This approach is one that I find very healthy journalistically, because it leaves the reporter freer to weigh all the details.
In other instances, officials insisted that, even for reporters, free access to courtrooms was not permitted.
He gave reporters free access to meetings in which the bleak progress of the drive against the Taliban was bluntly discussed.
He said: "We gave the reporters free rein to interview whomever they chose and to roam unaccompanied in the labour villages.
From the day of the bombing, the Saleh government has contrived to deny Western reporters free access, watching carefully where they go and whom they see.
Even freeloading journalists could take a charter flight this year: Expressjet was offering a select group of reporters free rides on a 41-seat plane from Los Angeles on Friday.
We gave the reporters free rein to interview whomever they chose and to roam unaccompanied in the labour villages.
This time six people managed to scale a fence on the perimeter before they were detained, and one of them shouted to reporters: "Free the stones, Free the people".
So the reporters, freed at 6 p.m. to write up what they had seen, had no idea how it would all play out.
Perhaps worse, whenever The Times finds a way to create a special perk for reporters, freeing them from some cost or complication with which the rest of us must cope, then it is administering social Novocain to its own nerve endings.
"Our task in helping to get reporters freed or prevent the detention of others is made harder by the perception that the United States is not as bright a beacon of press freedom as it once was," CPJ's deputy executive director, Robert Mahoney, told HuffPost.
