Meg Whitman, the billionaire former EBay executive who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor of California, has fumbled again — this time by badly abusing the trust of some of the state’s top political reporters.

Here’s how Carla Marinucci, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, described it:

Press shy GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman found herself challenged by reporters today after she announced an “open press” stop in Oakland, then refused to take questions the press — which was also barred from covering her tour of the port’s Union Pacific facility.

Reporters from Bay Area media outlets — TV, print and radio — turned up for Whitman’s advertised campaign stop in Oakland, where the former eBay CEO had announced a campaign stop and press event.

But once at the Union Pacific Railroad site, the assembled reporters were not allowed to view her tour — and herded into a holding room instead.

Then came the news that Whitman also wouldn’t take questions; reporters had been called in to “see” her make statements on “how she could be helpful as governor” on jobs and the economy, Whitman spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said.

(You can watch the political train wreck more or less as it happened in the video at the top. Note especially Whitman’s odd smiling and imperious Barbara Bush-style cackling at about the 1-minute mark as the hapless reporters attempt to ask her questions. Californians will undoubtedly be seeing that clip in television ads as the campaign heats up. )

It’s Politics 101 that you don’t lure the press to a photo op by mischaracterizing it as a “press event,” as Whitman’s campaign apparently did in this instance. Worse, you don’t then lie about your attempted manipulation of the media to reporters:

Pompei told reporters Whitman said the no press tour was a Union Pacific call — that the company’s officials did not want media coverage. (Union Pacific spokesman Aaron Hunt begs to differ. He just told us that “we planned, actually, to have press talk with Meg on the tour….we understood there would be media availability and we wanted to work with that.”)

And:

Reason, we were told: Whitman was running late. But Whitman lingered for some time with railroad officials in the same room — just feet away from the press, who refused to leave. Finally, they were herded out, at which point Whitman’s campaign drew the blinds and put up a movie screen to block them from seeing the candidate.

Whitman’s chief Republican opponent, Steve Poizner, currently the state’s Insurance commissioner but also a Silicon Valley millionaire, quickly released an ad titled “Runaway Meg,” chiding Whitman for persistently refusing to be interviewed or speak to extemporaneously with the media:

To date, Whitman has spent over $19 million of her own money on the campaign. (The primary is in June.) But so far, the publicity her campaign has generated has all been negative. In September, it came to light that she had not registered to vote until she was 46 years old — she’s in her mid-fifties now. And her excuse was the worst: She was too busy, what with work and raising a couple of kids and all.

Last year, it was revealed that she supported Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment — a position that shocked friends from her days in the liberal bastion of the Silicone Valley and was likely a craven an attempt to pander to California’s tiny, mostly elderly right-wing extreme.

Since then, Whitman has spent a fortune on radio ads that are long on inspirational rhetoric and short on key facts, including the fact that she is a Republican, just like current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose approval is stuck around 35 percent.

All that said, will her strategy of avoiding the press work? If it recent history is a guide, it certainly could. It’s the same strategy Schwarzenegger used during the recall election during which he wrested the office from the sitting governor, Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger’s one big interview during the recall was a softball sitdown with his Kennedy-cousin wife, Maria Shriver, conducted by Oprah Winfrey. (Thanks again, Oprah!)

However Schwarzenegger had something going for him that Whitman apparently does not: A team of national-level political operatives who know what they were doing. Their strategy of keeping Schwarzenegger away from the media was to prevent him from making gaffes. The public only saw him at rallies, grinning and swinging a broom (for the “clean sweep” he was supposedly going to give the capitol) and uttering his movie catch phrases like “I’ll be back,” ad naseum.

The Whitman campaign’s blunder with the media this week is unlikely to hobble her campaign, much less kill it. But it is not good to make patsies of the media in a state that is way too big for retail politics, where campaigns can live and die based on how they are covered on television.