New Hampshire House Speaker Bill O’Brien last week banned Concord Monitor reporters from a press event, and that ban is ongoing. The primary reason is not just the paper’s juvenile editorial cartoon comparing the speaker to Adolf Hitler. It is, as the speaker’s office tells it, that the Monitor has willingly become the media wing of the Democratic Party.

New Hampshire Democrats are running this year against Bill O’Brien. No matter the candidate, no matter the office, they are all running against O’Brien, who is routinely portrayed as a heartless bully. That is fine, to the speaker’s thinking. It’s all part of the game. But when a news organization purposefully conforms its coverage to the attack, then the newspaper has crossed a line. And the speaker thinks the Monitor has crossed that line.

It should be noted that the speaker still deals with The Portsmouth Herald and Keene Sentinel, whose editorial pages lean to the left and have been critical of the speaker. The Monitor, in his view, has gone further and directed its news coverage with the intent of aiding the Democratic Party, according to Chief of Staff Greg Moore.

Monitor Editor Felice Belman told us she disagrees with that assessment and that the paper is just trying to cover the speaker as well as what is going on in Concord.

To our reading, the Monitor’s coverage of O’Brien is little if any different than its coverage of former Gov. Craig Benson and former HHS Commissioner John Stephen. The paper is just as actively hostile to O’Brien as it was to them. Even if the paper were to go so far as to suggest that O’Brien is no different than a mass murderer (oh, wait, it did), the speaker’s chosen reaction is ill-considered.

O’Brien is the speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, not a business executive. He is answerable directly to the people, and the way the people access the speaker’s office is through the state’s media outlets. Shutting out the Monitor does not punish the paper, it punishes the paper’s readers.

All public officials should expect slanted and unfair coverage. Intentionally or not, it happens. The way to deal with it is not to deny access, but to point it out and go after it. As Jefferson said, the way to deal with error is to “combat it.” For a speaker who relishes political combat, this would seem to be the natural course to take.