[IP] FEMA accused of censorship
Begin forwarded message:
From: EEkid@xxxxxxx
Date: September 7, 2005 5:11:26 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: FEMA accused of censorship
FEMA accused of censorship
Wed Sep 7, 2005 4:26 PM ET
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When U.S. officials asked the media not to
take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath,
they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech
watchdogs said on Wednesday.
The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with
the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military
coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate
telephone interviews.
"It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose
subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the
subject of the story," said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center,
an authors' group that defends free expression.
U.S. newspapers, television outlets and Web sites have featured
pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.
But on Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers
along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would
take up valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not
to take pictures of the dead.
In an e-mail explaining the decision, a FEMA spokeswoman wrote: "The
recovery of victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost
respect and we have requested that no photographs of the deceased by
made by the media."
Efforts to recover bodies continued on Wednesday. Out in the city's
filthy waters, rescue teams tied bodies to trees or fences when they
found them and noted the location for later recovery before carrying
on in search of survivors.
Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
found this stance inexplicable.
"The notion that, when there's very little information from FEMA,
that they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the
reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply mind-
boggling," Daugherty said. "You cannot report on the disaster and
give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don't
see that there are bodies as well."
'INVITATION TO CHAOS'
FEMA's policy of excluding media from recovery expeditions in New
Orleans is "an invitation to chaos," according to Tom Rosenstiel,
director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of
Columbia University's journalism school.
"This is about managing images and not public taste or human
dignity," Rosenstiel said. He said FEMA's refusal to take journalists
along on recovery missions meant that media workers would go on their
own.
Rosenstiel also noted that U.S. media, especially U.S. television
outlets, are generally reluctant to show corpses.
"By and large, American television is the most sanitized television
in the world," he said. "They are less likely to show bodies, they
are less likely to show graphic images of the dead than any
television in the world."
There is also a question of what the American PEN Center's Siems
called "international equity," noting that American news outlets
cover stories around the world showing the effects of natural
disasters and wars in graphic detail.
"How is the world going to look at us if we go into their part of the
world and we broadcast these images and we do not allow ourselves to
look at such images when they're right in our own midst?" Siems said.
Mark Tapscott, a former editor at the Washington Times newspaper who
now deals with media issues at the Heritage Foundation, said the FEMA
decision did not amount to censorship.
"Let's not make a common decency issue into a censorship issue,"
Tapscott said. "Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and see their
dead uncle on the front page. That's just common decency."
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?
type=topNews&storyID=uri:
2005-09-07T202716Z_01_SPI773106_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CENSORSHIP-
DC.XML&pageNumber=1&summit=
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