In October, when California governor Pete Wilson vetoed a bill designed to lift a total ban on face-to-face interviews with prisoners, he joined the likes of George Clooney and Earl Spencer: he became a critic of celebrity journalism. Maintaining the original ban, enacted in 1995, Wilson argued that the press turns inmates into "celebrities," and that news media "attention is a disincentive to inmates to focus upon remorse."

California has gone further than any other state, prohibiting all journalists from all prisoner interviews, except those that occur randomly on prison tours, and it may turn out to be the trendsetter. Over the last couple of years, several state prison systems have adopted measures to lock out what they call "infotainment" shows. True, Indiana and Georgia recently dropped such bans under pressure. But other states -- among them Nebraska, Ohio, and Connecticut -- have adopted and kept policies blocking out infotainment shows. Virginia allows reporters but not cameras.

So what's their case? Even the most fervent supporters of media access to prisons do not deny that prison reporting sometimes violates good taste and good journalism, and it's not just the tabloid shows. Jenni Gainsborough at the National Prison Project, a prisoner-rights organization run by the ACLU, contends that "network shows constantly focus on the most heinous crimes, as if every prisoner is a serial killer or rapist. They use prisons to sensationalize rather than to educate."

 Many prison officials, though slow to come up with specific examples, have castigated the media, arguing that a threat to "legitimate penological interests" overrides the First Amendment. Challenged by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and other organizations, the California Department of Corrections defended its ban on interviews with a number of arguments, most of them playing on the anti-infotainment sentiment.

 In a statement that repeatedly refers to high-profile inmate Charles Manson, California authorities argued that, "Media interviews tend to glamorize crime by making inmates television 'stars' and thus undermine the severity of penalties to deter crime . . . . Once an inmate becomes a celebrity, the danger that he/she will lead or advocate violence or disobedience becomes akin to the danger presented by the formation of a prison gang." Other arguments made in California and elsewhere cite the harm done to victims by publicizing offenders, as well as the unnecessary risk posed by bringing cameras and crews into prisons merely to shoot entertainment shows.

Journalists pointed out that prisoners like Manson often become celebrities before they are sentenced, not as the result of prison interviews. More important, in a California prison system that houses 148,000 inmates, it's not just interview requests for the likes of Manson that have been turned down.

 For example, 60 Minutes could not interview any inmates for its March '97 story about the scandal at California's Corcoran State Prison, where more than fifty prisoners were shot -- seven of them killed -- in fights staged as sporting events by prison guards. California, says Peter Sussman, past president of the Northern California SPJ, is "using the celebrity issue to keep all the media out."

 Ironically, the California total-ban model may prove more resistant to challenge than what other states do, which is to try to make the sometimes difficult distinction between infotainment and regular news media. Inside Edition, for one, is often labeled infotainment by prison officials but its award-winning investigative unit has tackled complex prison stories.

 In Indiana, journalists overturned the anti-infotainment regulation by arguing that the definition of infotainment is vague enough to be used to silence critics and investigative reporters. "What prison officials consider a legitimate news medium today, they might call infotainment tomorrow, if they want to get a story killed," says Stephen Key of the Hoosier State Press Association.

Last spring TheAtlantaJournal and Constitution got the Department of Corrections' permission to interview Curtis Rower, imprisoned for murder, but Leeza, a topical TV talk show out of Los Angeles, was denied access. A team of lawyers, hired by Paramount, Leeza's producer, persuasively argued that such discrimination is unconstitutional. The department relented and dropped its ban on tabloid journalism. Authorities did not, however, drop their attitude.

 "Should it ever become the case," the department wrote to the Leeza lawyers on June 18, "that the Department is required to elect between seeing its inmates used as entertainment resources for TV talk shows, and forbidding all media interviews of all inmates at all times, the Department will act swiftly to elect the latter and not the former."

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