Aug. 1, 2004 – Organizers of the Bush-Cheney campaign repeatedly asked editors at the Arizona Daily Star to identify the race of a photographer assigned to cover Vice President Dick Cheney at a weekend rally in Tucson. "It was such an outrageous request," the Star's managing editor Teri Hayt said. "One has to wonder what they were going to do with that information."
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Rally organizer Christine Walton told Hayt that the race of Star photographer Mamta Popat was needed by the Secret Service in order to distinguish among people who have the same name.
According to the Star, the paper did provide the photographer’s name, birth date and social security number as is routine for all journalists who cover the president or vice president. "That's all anybody has been asked to provide," said Hayt, who also said that this incident was the first time a journalist’s race had ever been requested during her 26-year journalism career.
