Raleigh

It was a rare day at the North Carolina General Assembly. The circus came to town. The ringmaster was a Republican state senator from Cabarrus County, Fletcher Hartsell. He had his hands full, trying to tame corporate lawyers, press lawyers, indignant journalists and a state-owned television agency.

The legislature hadn't seen such fun since the state House kicked out one of its own, a kicking-and-screaming Thomas Wright.

Like Wright, the folks in the various rings of this three-ring circus may not have seen it that way.

Hartsell had started the show by subpoenaing a UNC-TV reporter, Eszter Vadja, and the station's general manager, Tom Howe. The senator demanded that they appear before his Senate judiciary committee with documentary footage that Vadja had compiled on aluminum-maker Alcoa.

Hartsell wanted to show that Alcoa, seeking another 50-year federal license to operate its four dams on the Yadkin River, didn't deserve the license. Earlier this decade, it had shuttered its aluminum smelting plant on the shores on Lake Badin and laid off the workers. Why should it still control the river's waters without providing a substantial benefit to the state?

He hoped that the documentary footage would help make the case and apparently feared that UNC-TV might deep-six the project. (They didn't, at least not after Hartsell issued his subpoenas.)

So he broadcast it himself at the committee meeting. The footage didn't present the company in a very flattering light.

The show set off all manner of roaring, teeth-baring and tail-switching by those lawyers and journalists.

Press lawyers criticized Hartsell's use of a subpoena to get the documentary. The state, after all, has a shield law to protect journalistic enterprises from having to turn over unpublished footage, notes, sources, etc. A national organization of statehouse reporters, CapitolBeat, added its own condemnation.

Alcoa executives and lawyers complained that the documentary footage was unfair. They told Hartsell and the committee that, yes, its Badin plant had released PCBs years ago. But they insisted that the PCBs in fish in Badin Lake weren't necessarily their PCBs. Got it?

Then one of the Alcoa execs had the pleasure of being worked over by the committee for half an hour.

It's not clear that Hartsell advanced his cause very much. His decision to issue the subpoenas was a bit ham-fisted. As a state agency, UNC-TV would have had to turn over the footage without a subpoena. His subpoenas only riled up the press and its lawyers.

But the fuss over the subpoenas was a bit absurd. UNC-TV isn't an independent news agency. As with any other state agency, most of its documents and materials are public records, and so subject to any public request for that material.

It's also questionable whether UNC-TV is, in any traditional sense, a journalistic enterprise. Its bucolic, mythologized view of North Carolina - where -everyone plays the dulcimer, collects Ben Owen pottery and grows organic vegetables - looks a lot more like -entertainment.

The exception of this Alcoa piece, and the resulting controversy, only proves the point.

Scott Mooneyham writes for Capitol Press Association in Raleigh. Contact him at smooneyh@ncinsider.com.