Sensibly stonewalling the press.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Politician William Bulger's relations with media

The marble corridor of the state-house looks more like a parapet for the press as dozens of print and broadcast reporters, tape recorders and microphones in hand, lie in wait.

Where do you stand on the controversial gun law being voted on today? How about the budget bill? The abortion amendment? The charges levied against you by your opponent back home?

What do you do?

If you're William Bulger, whose relationship with his home city press has been somewhat incendiary, you don't have to answer. Or you could even mutter the unthinkable: "I'm sorry, but I don't have an answer for you now. I'm still trying to think it out."

Heresy? In the era of hypermedia coverage, Bulger doesn't think so. In fact, he believes that sometimes stonewalling the press is the only sensible response.

"I doubt that many people in life would want to be staked to a position based on what they said in an impromptu press interview," says Bulger. "But lawmakers are all of the time.

"I honestly believe this," he continues, "we have a right to say 'no' to them. Just as they say 'I must keep you at arm's length lest I be co-opted by you,' we ought to be able to say the same thing. There is a real danger that we're being co-opted by them."

Bulger's complaint against the press transcends the usual gripe that reporters want to know too much, too often, too soon. He contends, instead, that because publishers and station owners have political points of view, reporters are little different from any of the other competing interest groups lawmakers daily contend with. They are only more dangerous, Bulger adds, because they have the ability to make their views widely know.

"I'm insufferable on this issue," Bulger laughs. But not without reason: In the mid-1970s as South Boston, under a federal busing order, simmered on the verge of racial conflagration, Bulger noticed that the city's press habitually classified a racial incident as any white-on-black...