An incident in Hamilton last week in which three environmentalists - including an 80-year-old man - were escorted from a Bitterroot National Forest press conference probably is raising more of a stink in certain circles than it deserves. Still, it left the agency looking as though it were trying to spin the news, and rather clumsily at that.

The press conference had been called to announce the agency's preferred alternative for a controversial timber sale - the first in the nation under President Bush's Healthy Forests Restoration Act. The Forest Service invited six Ravalli County residents who helped craft the plan to attend the conference.

When the environmentalists, Jim Miller, Stewart Brandborg and Larry Campbell of the Friends of the Bitterroot, walked into the room, they were quickly shown the door. Bitterroot Forest Supervisor Dave Bull told the Missoulian that the agency wanted to provide a "safe environment" for the community members. The Forest Service also argued that the event wasn't a meeting, but a "press conference for working media," and therefore wasn't subject to open meeting laws.

The expulsion of the three men raises all sorts of questions, such as whether opponents of a proposed Forest Service action still have a right as members of the public to listen to it being announced in a publicly owned building, or exactly how the "working media" is to be defined in this age of bloggers and other alternative news sources.

But the main question is whether the agency was simply attempting to manage the news. The answer: Of course it was.

The Forest Service wanted to give the impression that ordinary citizens of the region were squarely behind the timber sale, and they didn't want any naysayers around to spoil the happy mood. The whole thing smacks of those televised question and answer sessions in which President Bush fielded softball queries from a room packed with the president's supporters.

Well, if you don't mind, we in the "working media" would just as soon take our press conferences straight.