How New Jersey media caught Chris Christie lounging on a beach he closed to the public

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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is under fire after he was photographed lounging with his family on an empty New Jersey beach that he had closed to the public over the July 4 weekend because of a government shutdown.

Christie defended his use of the beach, saying he had previously announced his plans to vacation at the state-owned governor's beach house and that the media had simply "caught a politician keeping his word."

Bu that hasn't stopped his critics and constituents from lambasting the wildly unpopular governor, who is heading into his final six months in office with approval ratings at 15 per cent.

Matthew Arco is a political reporter who writes exclusively about Christie for The Star-Ledger and NJ.com, which first published the photos by Andrew Mills. He spoke with As It Happens guest host Laura Lynch about how the story unfolded. 

Laura Lynch: Matt, tell us about how your paper got these photographs.

Matthew Arco:  We knew that the governor was at Island Beach Park, where the state owns the beach house that the sitting governor has unfettered access to. 

But I guess somebody in our office thought it was worthwhile at least to go take a look and see if anybody was hanging out and taking in the sun on the big, empty beach.

LL: Why use aerial photographs?

MA: We're in a shutdown, so all of the beaches are open along the coast, except two state park beaches, and one of them is Island Beach State Park.

So we were up in the air taking pictures of sort of the contrast, where you see thousands of people on the beach and then it just stops in a line and then the beach is wide open, and that's what's closed as part of the government shutdown since the legislature didn't send the governor a budget bill.

LL: Gov. Christie had already announced he would be at the Island Beach State Park this weekend and at the official residence. Why do you think there was still such an uproar after the photos came out?

MA: He's not popular to begin with, but it's the visual. The state is shut down. A lot of folks obviously probably had plans to go to Island Beach State Park because it was ahead of the July 4th weekend. Their plans were disrupted.

And it's also the image of, you know, you have thousands of people crammed on a beach and then you have a big wide open beach where the governor seems to be having a good time.

The optics of it certainly probably strikes a nerve, I think it's safe to say, with a lot of New Jersians, including the tens of thousands of state workers who, as of today, were furloughed.

LL: I guess it's sort of his "let them eat cake" moment.

MA: When you have the image of it, it comes across that way, I'm sure, to some people.

LL: At first he said that he did not get any sun when he was asked about it at a news conference. Why do you think he said that?

MA: Early on in the weekend when the shutdown came to pass, the controversy started to swirl about him being the only one on that beach. And there were a lot of memes circulating online and his critics were criticizing him for that fact.

So, when we went to a press conference yesterday, a colleague of mine was going to ask the governor a question about something else, but related to his time on the beach, and he opened it by saying it looks like [Christie] got some sun.

And I think, in typical Christie fashion, where if he senses snark coming from a reporter or he senses there's a question coming that he doesn't want to answer, he gets pushy, right off the bat.

But it was an odd moment because, at the time, neither my colleague or me knew that two hours earlier we had another colleague taking photographs of him on the beach.

LL: You know this guy. You've been covering him for a long time. Do you think he just doesn't care?

MA: He says he doesn't care about where he stands in the polls. He also says that he doesn't believe that the polls are 100 per cent accurate. But you have to care.

Being the only people to be on the beach in a government shutdown, but taking advantage of that because that's a perk of the job, you know, comes back to snag him.

With files from Associated Press