News groups fight Interior proposal for film, photo fees
NOELLE STRAUB Star-Tribune Washington bureau | Posted: Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - A proposal to require a permit and fee for some filming and photography in national parks and forests may allow government control over news coverage, lawmakers and journalism groups warned Wednesday.
Congress passed a law in 2000 requiring federal agencies to issue a permit and charge a reasonable fee for commercial filming on federal lands. The law was aimed mainly at movie productions. Each agency collected fees with an individual approach, and this summer a proposed rule was issued to standardize the regulations.
Numerous journalism groups testified at a hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee that the proposed regulations would leave too much discretion to local park and forest managers, allowing them to control what issues get coverage. They also said the exemption for news coverage should cover all types of news, including feature or investigative pieces, not just breaking news such as wildfires.
Federal officials said they would take the comments into consideration before issuing a final rule.
In October, a freelance radio journalist working on a piece about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park was told she would need to get a permit and pay a $200 fee in order to interview a park wolf biologist, said Timothy Wheeler, president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. She was also told she would need liability insurance covering at least $1 million, he said.
After his group called National Park Service headquarters in Washington, officials there called Yellowstone staff members and reminded them that journalists don't need permits, Wheeler said, and the woman was able to conduct her interview without a permit or fee. But the incident illustrates that current law is so imprecise and unclear that it could be interpreted that way.
The proposed regulation is "vague and just as subject to interpretation as the old ones," he said.
Wheeler also said only crews filming "breaking news" are exempt from permits and fees, but those working on features or investigative pieces should also be exempt. The regulation should also take the broadest possible view of who can cover the news, he said.
Covering fires in Yellowstone National Park would not require a permit, but Hollywood-style movies would, said Mitch Butler, an Interior Department deputy assistant secretary. In between, some gray area exists, he added.
Commercial filming is defined in the proposed regulation so as to exclude news coverage, but there is no definition of "news." The department is considering adding one, Butler said. He said there is no intention of censorship by the agencies, including the Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The new regulations are meant to standardize implementation of the permit and fee requirements and what triggers the news exemption, Butler said. But because of the uniqueness of each proposal to film and of each park unit, the determination as to whether a particular project will fall under permit requirements is often made on the ground.
Butler has received objections to classifying documentaries as commercial filming, and the department will take those comments into consideration, Butler said.
The "vast majority" of still photography would not require a permit, Butler said. Such permits would be needed only when photographers are using props not natural to the park, in areas normally closed to the public or when the agency needs to monitor the activity to ensure resources are protected, he said.
The Interior Department and Forest Service are jointly coming up with a fee schedule for commercial filming. The Park Service during fiscal year 2007 collected $460,000 in location fees and slightly less than $1 million in cost recovery, Butler said.
Leslie Weldon of the Forest Service said that since 2001 that agency has collected $2.3 million in fees, including $388,000 in fiscal year 2007.
The fees are kept and spent by the agencies, with at least 80 percent of the money staying at the site where it was collected.
The Forest Service is focusing on requiring permits based on the actual use of the land by photographers or film crews rather than how or where their final product would be delivered, Weldon said. There will be lots of flexibility on the local level over decisions on when permits would be required.
Fees for commercial filming would be determined by the number of crew, amount of equipment and days spent filming, the officials said.
Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., also slammed the new rules.
"A reasonable return to the Federal Treasury for the commercial use of federal lands is one thing. Trying to hide the damage done to those lands from the public under a mound of fees and permits is quite another," he said.
There is no reason to limit any kind of photography if the act does not disturb public use of land, said Tony Overman, president of the National Press Photographers Association. He said the regulations would give Interior employees "excessively broad discretion" and questioned why the department would extend restrictions on journalists.