A reader sent us this tip, pointing us to this story — to the paragraph at the end:
CNN has obtained a restraining order to prevent emergency officials in the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone from keeping the media from covering the recovery of bodies. CNN filed suit Friday in U.S. District Court in Houston. A hearing has been scheduled for Saturday morning.
This is hard one to predict, so we won’t predict.
Suffice to say, though, that you have several issues at play. One is what government policy has been during OTHER natural disasters…and unnatural ones, such as 911. Is this a new government clamp down?
Another is government intent.
Is it truly to honor the dead? That’s possible. Or is it to put a lid on public criticism of FEMA in particular — to avoid the newspaper and broadcast photos of coffins, bodies being recovered, etc. which would turn the inevitable easy-to-not-feel statistics into dead-flesh-and-blood images? That’s possible AS WELL.
And if there’s a hearing and one side loses, does this mean it goes to the you-know-where…Supreme Court? And what happens there?
PREDICTION: If it is indeed government intent to put a lid on controversy surrounding federal performance, it’s unlikely to work in the long run.
The chorus of criticism against the federal government coming from not just Democrats and independents (who increasingly side with the Democrats against this administration) but REPUBLICANS is unlikely to be stemmed — even with parts of the always-defend-Bush-no-matter-what establishment infomachine (talk radio, certain Fox News broadcasts) working fulltime staying on message about local and state failures, while downplaying federal failure — and in effect acting as defense lawyers for the Bush administration. The extent of the federal failure seems to have outraged a broad enough spectrum of people so that those who defend the federal government in a lockstep manner risk bringing a perfect storm that permanently damages their own longterm credibility.
UPDATE: The government has decided not to fight this battle in the face of CNN’s lawsuit — and now the questions that rage will be (1)what was the government’s position in the case of 911 and (2) what was the news media’s attitude in the case of 911. And if these were different, why? CNN reports:
Rather than fight a lawsuit by CNN, the federal government abandoned its effort Saturday to prevent the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans.
Joint Task Force Katrina “has no plans to bar, impede or prevent news media from their news gathering and reporting activities in connection with the deceased Hurricane Katrina victim recovery efforts,” said Col. Christian E. deGraff, representing the task force.
U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison issued a temporary restraining order Friday against a “zero access” policy announced earlier in the day by Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who is overseeing the federal relief effort in the city, and Terry Ebbert, the city’s homeland security director.
In explaining the ban, Ebbert said, “we don’t think that’s proper” to let members of the media view the bodies.
The judge was to consider granting a permanent injunction Saturday when the government announced its decision not to enforce the “zero access” policy.
In an e-mail to CNN staff, CNN News Group President Jim Walton said the network filed the the lawsuit to “prohibit any agency from restricting its ability to fully and fairly cover” the hurricane victim recovery process.
“As seen most recently from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, from tsunami-ravaged South Asia and from Hurricane Katrina’s landfall along the Gulf,” Walton wrote, “CNN has shown that it is capable of balancing vigorous reporting with respect for private concerns.”
CNN filed suit against Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, arguing that the officials who announced the decision were acting on FEMA’s behalf.
A lingering question will be: was the government’s changed stance related at all to Michael Brown being yanked off hurrican disaster relief?
One problem that administrations (of all parties) learn is that when you battle the news media you can sometimes lose more in the war even if you win the battle. Perhaps government lawyers and political advisors figured by not challenging the CNN lawsuit further they would remove the allegation of officials trying to control the impact of the storms (and the bungled efforts by government during and immediately after it).
Reaction to this story has been strong. A cross section from weblogs:
—Glenn Reynolds:”THE PRESS WANTS TO SHOW BODIES from Katrina. It didn’t want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public. I can only conclude that this time around, the press thinks it’s a good thing to inflame the public. What could the difference be?”
—Americablog’s Chris:”CNN deserves credit here for plenty of good coverage (with a few exceptions) and also fighting for real freedom and not the Bush-style freedom, whatever the hell that is.”
—Donald Sensing (who is a superb conservative blogger, yet another sign that these issues are NOT liberal/conservative issues as some suggest but larger issues at play here) writes in part:
Not content to seize property unlawfully and evict people from their homes, government authorities – this time the Bush administration – are trying to suppress First Amendment rights….
It’s one thing for government officials to ask media to be sensitive to scenes of high emotional potential, and quite another for them to attempt to actually prevent photos of them from being taken or restrict access to sites merely because of the scenes. The former might be ill advised (and strikes of nannyism, too) but isn’t a rights problem. The latter pretty clearly is.
Take a moment to note what’s happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn’t get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what’s happening in the city.
This is a domestic, natural disaster. Absent specific cases where members of the press would interfere or get in the way of some particular clean up operation, or perhaps demolition work, there is simply no reason why credentialed members of the press should not be able to cover everything that is happening in that city. Think about it.
If it wasn’t necessary to show people plunging to their death, why is it necessary to show them after they drowned? (Or as Scott Ott parodies a CNN spokesman, “Our viewers have a right to see the decaying flesh of each and every citizen who perished from lack of federal government assistance”.)
Incidentally, has anybody asked Mayor Nagin or Governor Blanco what they think of this?
It’s even more astonishing, coming from a network which for over a decade whitewashed images of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, just to maintain a “LIVE FROM BAGHDAD” line chromakeyed on the screen while their reporter spoke in front of Saddam’s Ministry of Information. Broadcasting the same lies from Saddam Hussein’s propaganda ministers they could have just as easily have picked up on any news wire and reported from CNN’s facilities in Atlanta–along with some thoughts on what the true story might be.
—The Peking Duck:”Several of my beloved commenters have been insisting the differences between press freedoms in the US and China are minimal, if they even exist. I, too, was extremely critical this week when my government tried to restrict press coverage of the hunt for bodies of Katrina’s victims in New Orleans, and compared the move to the type of thing I’d expect from China. But in America there are some dramatic differences: namely, the US media can take the government to court and does so all the time. And they can win.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.