Romney Campaign Tries to Block Reporters PETERSBURG, Fla. - The Romney campaign is renowned for its hyper-disciplined approach to the news media. Question-and-answer sessions with reporters are exceedingly rare. Aides are not available for regular on-the-record briefings. And the candidate's latest outreach to voters, a series of casual meetings with middle-class Americans, has been shielded from public view. But on Wednesday morning, the campaign took that restrictiveness to a new level - before quickly backing down. After Mitt Romney delivered a speech, aides told members of the traveling press corp that they could neither enter the audience nor approach the rope line where Mr. Romney shakes voters" hands and engages in casual conversation. Access to such interactions has long been a staple of presidential campaign reporting, allowing reporters to capture unscripted moments and pose questions to the candidate (who typically ignores or pretends not to hear them). Mr. Romney, however, has at times proved a chatty and news-making figure on the rope lines. It was there, for example, that he told reporters that "even Jimmy Carter would have given the order" to kill Osama Bin Laden, and that while he was not an avid Nascar fan, he was friendly with Nascar team owners. Around 9:50 a.m. Wednesday, as reporters moved toward the crowd, a campaign aide and a volunteer, acting on what they suggested were orders from the campaign, tried to physically block members of the press from leaving a designated area. The reporters disobeyed the direction, triggering a brief standoff, followed by a flurry of Twitter messages describing what had happened. A similar, less confrontational incident occurred in Charlotte, N.C., last week. The Secret Service quickly explained on Wednesday afternoon that there was no security reason for preventing reporters from entering the audience at campaign events, making clear that the restriction came from the campaign, not the agency. By 12:45 p.m., the Romney campaign had reversed itself, calling the restriction a mistake. "This was an error on the part of the campaign staff and volunteers," said Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, in an e-mail. We have reminded them that press is allowed on the rope line to record the governor's interactions with voters. There is some precedent for slowly restricting press access as candidates move from a crowded primary field, where they are fighting for airtime, into a general election race, where a disciplined message is considered crucial. Senator John McCain's reporter-friendly bus, the "Straight Talk Express," ground to a halt during the summer before the 2008 election, as his relations with the news media soured, for instance. President Obama all but never answers questions on the rope line, because of security concerns, and he holds news conferences infrequently. But his press secretary, Jay Carney, answers reporters" questions almost daily during the White House briefing - a practice the Romney campaign has not adopted. Mr. Romney's team does have a traveling press secretary, Rick Gorka, but he is rarely willing or able to speak on the record on behalf on the candidate, and the campaign rarely sends a senior staffer on the road to regularly brief the press.