I can appreciate that no administration enjoys negative publicity. Particularly when things are going poorly overseas, the White House hates to see disheartening images every night on the evening news.
That being said, the public deserves unfiltered news. An informed electorate relies on good and bad news to help reach judgments about their government and its leaders. It’s one of the reasons I was disappointed to see that the Bush administration has “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases,” as Dana Milbank reported today in the Post.
In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. “There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops,” the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains.
The administration noted that the policy originally began at the very end of the Clinton administration, but it has gone “unheeded and unenforced” until now. A Pentagon spokesperson noted that restrictions on coffin coverage existed before, but more recently, “we’ve really tried to enforce it.”
That’s the problem. The troops that are dying in Iraq on a nearly-daily basis are making the ultimate sacrifice. By denying the public access to footage of their remains returning to the U.S., the Bush White House is suggesting that public relations, and not honoring these soldiers’ sacrifice, is foremost on their minds.
As Clinton’s former press secretary Joe Lockhart said, “This administration manipulates information and takes great care to manage events, and sometimes that goes too far. For them to sit there and make a political decision because this hurts them politically — I’m outraged.”