The smirk stuck with Laura Belin, a left-leaning journalist who covers Iowa politics.
A press aide to Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, flashed it at her as he shut her out of a January budget briefing, just moments after welcoming in a scrum of other reporters.
“This is a private office,” he said, closing the door in her face. Ms. Belin said he seemed “very happy” as he did so.
For two decades, Ms. Belin has been publishing investigative journalism and political analysis on her site, Bleeding Heartland, as well as a more recent Substack account, powered by records requests, inside sources, open meetings and public information. She also co-hosts a radio show on KHOI, based in Ames, Iowa. The Washington Post, The Des Moines Cityview, Politico, Esquire and Talking Points Memo have cited Ms. Belin’s reporting.
Her beat is hot right now: Iowa is bursting with competitive elections, including the neck-and-neck U.S. Senate race between Representative Ashley Hinson, a Republican, and Josh Turek, a Democratic state representative.
A longtime Democrat, Ms. Belin is unabashedly liberal in her work. Her write-ups have the feel of something that MS NOW or HuffPost, two left-leaning national outlets, might publish.
She also donates to the Democratic politicians she covers — something many traditional journalism outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, Politico and The Associated Press, strongly discourage or explicitly forbid. Fox News allows its journalists to donate to campaigns; MS NOW and The Huffington Post do not.
Her open embrace of one party appears to have resulted in quite a few doors closed by the other. Her requests for credentials to cover the Iowa House triggered denial after denial; her requests to sit among her peers years ago on the Iowa Senate’s media row met with a similar fate, until authorities booted all reporters from the space. Her attempts to get patched in to Senator Charles Grassley’s news conference calls have ended in frustration; and she has even struggled to get on press distribution lists.
At the same time, Ms. Belin isn’t partisan enough to qualify for the red carpet treatment that campaigns around the country are increasingly rolling out for internet influencers, bypassing traditional journalists in favor of friendlier interviews. Three times in this election cycle, Ms. Belin said, she has attended events for Democratic candidates at which influencers got one-on-one interviews with top candidates while reporters were left to ask their questions in a group setting.
It’s a modest slight in comparison with what Ms. Belin faces from the other side of the aisle. But her ongoing fight for press access highlights the shifting definition of what it means to be a reporter in a fractured and increasingly opinionated media landscape. Podcasters and Substack writers with clear biases are finding larger and larger audiences, even as the institutions they cover demand objectivity and neutrality.
The Republican Party of Iowa didn’t respond to a question about Ms. Belin’s struggle for access, though a spokeswoman pointed to her history of donating to politicians she covers and her statement that she does not “pretend to be objective” or hide her opinions.
Ms. Belin points out that her donations are a matter of public record and that she also writes skeptical pieces about Democrats and their prospects in Iowa.
“I’m writing the stories that I would want to read and covering the news in the way that I want to cover it,” she said.
Access makes a “real difference,” she said. “And I think that if it didn’t, I don’t think they would have gone to such lengths to exclude me from all these opportunities.”
Diving into Iowa politics wasn’t Ms. Belin’s initial plan. After graduating from Harvard University in 1991, she got a master’s in Russian studies from the University of Oxford and proceeded to cover Russian politics for a Prague-based research institute and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
But Ms. Belin’s interest in state politics won the professional tug of war against Vladimir V. Putin’s use of state power. When Bleeding Heartland launched in 2007, Ms. Belin, who grew up in Iowa, first joined as a frequent commenter under the handle “desmoinesdem.” The site’s management was impressed enough with her feedback to ask her to write articles.
She was off and posting. “I had a toddler and a preschooler,” recalled Ms. Belin, who eventually took over the site. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could do this — this is fine.’”
Ms. Belin has built an audience via ubiquity, toting her video tripod from event to event and chasing down politicians for quotes. Like many independent journalists, Ms. Belin keeps her sites fresh with analysis and commentary from herself and others, but she pursues investigative projects as well, like a story about how Governor Reynolds used Covid relief funds to pay staff in her office. Though the governor denied inappropriate spending, a state audit later found fault with her actions. The U.S. Treasury Department earlier this year disputed the findings of the state audit.
“No one else was interested in the governor’s office budget,” noted Ms. Belin via email.
“She does excellent original reporting, she’s meticulous in her research, she’s ethical and she’s accurate,” said Kathie Obradovich, editor in chief of The Iowa Capital Dispatch, an affiliate of the nonprofit States Newsroom.
Ms. Belin’s family home in the Des Moines suburbs, which she inherited, serves as the home base for Bleeding Heartland, as well as the stomping ground for Sammy, a mixed-breed dog who sets up shop on a well-worn pet bed alongside Ms. Belin’s workstation once he ascertains that all is quiet.
The troubles for Ms. Belin start when she ventures from her cozy, solo newsroom. Starting in 2019, Ms. Belin was repeatedly denied a press pass to cover the Iowa House, which has long been under Republican control. The initial rationale for withholding credentials was that they are “not issued to members of the public.” A year later, she was told that credentials are not issued to outlets that are “nontraditional/independent in nature.”
After about five years of back and forth, Ms. Belin sued for access in a federal court. Days later, the Iowa House granted Ms. Belin the credentials.
The Iowa Senate in 2022 took a more dramatic step. Rather than tussle with Ms. Belin and other independent reporters, it booted all the journalists from the media row at the front of the chamber and relocated them to the nosebleed seats high above the action on the floor. A spokesman blamed “nontraditional” outlets for creating problems.
She also claims that she has been excluded from the conference calls that Senator Grassley holds for reporters. Mr. Grassley’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Republicans don’t hold a monopoly on Ms. Belin’s hassles over access. At the Iowa Democratic Party’s convention in June, for example, progressive influencers were granted individual interviews with the party’s top hopefuls. Ms. Belin and other reporters took part in a short group interview with Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor.
When Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky came to Des Moines, also in June, to barnstorm with Mr. Sand, influencers were accorded privileged access for a video highlighting the event. Ms. Belin and others struggled to land their questions in a loud group interview with the politicians.
So Ms. Belin will continue showing up wherever she can get a seat. In June, she videotaped the public meeting of a state panel on the ballot eligibility of some Libertarian candidates — a recording that a state court later relied on for key findings, calling it “high quality.”
And on a Wednesday evening in mid-October, Ms. Belin went to the headquarters of Iowa PBS for a debate between Chris McGowan, a Republican, and Dave Dawson, a Democrat, in the race to represent Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District. She wanted to buttonhole the candidates after the event, especially Mr. McGowan.
Once the polemics concluded, Ms. Belin hustled to the lobby and conducted an interview with Mr. Dawson. She later learned that Mr. McGowan had left the building, somehow bypassing her.
“I had so many questions for him!” said Ms. Belin.
Sheelagh McNeill and Georgia Gee contributed research.
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