Quickie...
News this morning is that FEMA and DHS has put a moratorium on photos of the dead in New Orleans.
Kind of like the moratorium on photos of caskets returning from the war in Iraq.
More evidence that they view the population of the United States as children who can't handle reality and have to be protected from things they can't handle.
A far cry from the days of award winning World War II journalism with actual photos of the horrors of war.
Can't have the American public actually SEEING anything going wrong. That might make people question.
You want another reason why this Administration is damaging? Because this is dangerously close to propaganda. We have our own TASS. Our own Pravda. Control the media, control what the public sees. Free media? Who needs it.
Liam.
posted by Liam at 9/07/2005 02:30:00 PM
3 Comments:
Can they do that?
I know that the dead bodies are personal, sacred and a bit gross at this point. But, they are out in public. Are they allowed to tell us that we can't look at something?
Wednesday, September 07, 2005 4:07:00 PM
Allowed to? No, not particularly.
But there are lots of ways they can do it. They can prevent people from accessing areas which are considered "dangerous". They can, if they want, decide to clamp down and not let any reporters in to New Orleans.
They really want to control what we see. Bush's speech down there was apparently a photo op. There were two rescue helicoptors grounded so that they could be in the background behind him. There were numbers of firefighters ordered into the area to stand around as Bush's backdrop when according to an interview I heard with one of them, they'd much rather have been out working on rescue tasks.
A good point I heard today was that during the Clinton administration, there was a little nothing story at one point that turned into a tempest in a teapot about how Clinton got a haircut on the tarmac at some airport, and the Rush Limbaughs of the world insisted that Clinton's haircut delayed air traffic for half an hour.
That turned out to not be true, but it got weeks of play and bad press for Clinton. And that, even if true, delayed people's flights by a few minutes.
Bush's use of those two helicopters and those firefighters delayed rescue efforts. And there's no outcry.
But Bush got his backdrop, making it look like he was in the center of the people working to save New Orleans.
Form over substance, spin over fact. That's all we get, time and again from this Administration. That's my biggest issue. The lies and the spin and the control of every aspect of what we see is so complete that even when they do something RIGHT, I'm not inclined to believe it. That boy has cried wolf so many times that even if, once in a while, there really is a wolf, I don't even bother to consider that there might be.
That's what pro-Bush folks don't get. It's not that I refuse to beleive he could possibly do ANYTHING right, it's that he's lied to us so often I don't believe it even when it is true.
Liam.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005 4:24:00 PM
Latest reports apparently are that reporters are now being forcibly ejected from New Orleans, and Bush (or FEMA) has banned all media from the city.
It's early reports, so it may not have any more veracity as some of the other wild stories we've heard. We'll see.
Liam.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005 4:32:00 PM
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