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It may have all been just a big misunderstanding. But the Kansas statehouse press corps scored a point for transparency on Monday, when they staged a walkout rather than take part in an off-the-record briefing from legislators.

The subject at hand was the controversial education-funding bill that is currently speeding through the state legislature—a key plank in Gov. Sam Brownback’s efforts to fill a severe budget hole. On Monday, a day before the measure was to come up for a vote in committee, reporters were invited to a briefing with the bill’s sponsors. But there was an unusual condition, according to Bryan Lowry of The Wichita Eagle.

“A GOP staffer was telling us that we were going to have this press conference, but it was going to be an off-record press conference—which none of us had even heard of before,” Lowry said…The issue of education is sensitive topic for Kansas Republicans, who have been accused by critics of seeking to gut school funding to finance major tax cuts that went into effect in 2013. Partly because of that political sensitivity, and partly because of the speed with which the bill, introduced late last week, is moving through the legislature, Lowry and others in the press corps were on their guard. He and his colleagues—from The Associated Press,Kansas City Star, Topeka Capital-Journal, and Lawrence Journal-World—met at the Capitol before the scheduled briefing on Monday to discuss what to do, he said…

But when they went to the briefing site, at the office of one of the bill sponsors, and made their conditions known, the same House GOP staffer refused to guarantee that any part of the briefing would be on the record, he said.

It was longtime Associated Press bureau chief John Hanna, Lowry said, who replied, “I don’t agree to that.”

And so, he said, “We walked.” The five reporters who had met before the meeting were joined in the walkout by a reporter for the nonprofit Kansas Health Institute News Service.

http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/kansas_reporters_briefing_walkout.php