HARRISBURG -- Many government officials appear to think it's OK to deny members of the public the same government record they would hand over to a reporter.

They are wrong.

The news media have no special legal right to government records and information.

Yet a survey of nearly 700 government offices across Pennsylvania found evidence that reporters are sometimes treated better than other citizens. The surveyors also documented instances in which service improved noticeably after they disclosed their media affiliation.

Employees of 50 newspapers and a television station sought public records from local and county offices across Pennsylvania in late February. The survey, coordinated by The Associated Press, was designed to gauge the state of access three years after the Legislature strengthened the Right-to-Know Law.

In one extreme case, Linwood District Judge Rocco Gaspari insisted on seeing media credentials before he would produce a criminal file -- a policy he has maintained for years even though the state Supreme Court's guidelines grant the public and reporters the same access to most of his records.

In a follow-up interview, Gaspari's justification was simple.

"I'm not going to give information out to anybody who walks in off the street, because I don't run the court that way," said Gaspari, whose courtroom is near the Delaware line in southeastern Pennsylvania.

While a majority of offices surveyed -- including Gaspari's -- provided at least some of the information requested, in many cases that occurred only after they insisted on knowing where the surveyor worked. The surveyors were instructed ahead of time to give their names but not to volunteer that they worked for a newspaper or TV station and not to disclose it before asking if that was a condition of access.

Overall, roughly one in three requests did not immediately yield at least some of the requested records, but when the requester was identified as an employee of a news organization, the denial rate fell to one in four.

Police departments also engaged in aggressive questioning, which supervisors later said was designed to help them determine whether their call logs might end up in the wrong hands.

Police and reporters famously have a love-hate relationship, but their familiarity with each other -- and each other's goals -- can make access easier, said Police Chief David A. Faust in the Lehigh Valley town of Emmaus.

"If a person is just trying to collect information, we have to evaluate it case by case. Now with the press, it's not as difficult -- we have guidelines, we have policy and the district attorney's office gives us some direction," Faust said.

To protect the safety of witnesses and victims, Shippensburg District Judge Harold Bender said he needs to know how his records will be used, but said that concern does not arise for those with press credentials.

"If somebody came into my office and said, 'The police just wrote up a citation for a cute little blonde out here in a little sports car, I'd like to see the citation,' how do we know what their purpose is on that?" said Bender, whose office is in southcentral Pennsylvania.

A Bethlehem Police sergeant insisted on press credentials before turning over a stack of reports, telling a reporter they contained sensitive information a "common Joe" would not be allowed to see.

Lt. David Strawn later said the general public would be given access to most reports on specific incidents.

Other chiefs said disclosing information to the press can be in their self-interest, enabling them to obtain the public's help in solving crimes and to show that tax dollars are being spent wisely. It's an edge that the general public doesn't share.

When surveyors resisted answering questions about their affiliation or motives, they were often viewed suspiciously, as when a spokesman for a school district northeast of Philadelphia declined to turn over the superintendent's contract.

"Maybe if she had identified herself as a reporter and I had gone to the superintendent and talked to him, it would have been a very easy thing to do," Pennsbury schools spokesman Elliott Alexander said later, acknowledging that the contract is a public document.

In one case the opposite was true -- being a reporter made access more difficult.

Superintendent Donna L. Mettler of the Wellsboro Area School District said "problems with information in the local press" that cover her district in northern tier Tioga County were behind the questions she posed to a surveyor about how her contract information would be used.

"To tell you the truth, it was the fact that it was a newspaper asking," Mettler said. "If just a citizen had come off the street, there wouldn't have even been any hesitation." She did not provide her contract at the time, but later said it was available for public review.