That’s what I get for giving the administration the benefit of the doubt. When I first heard about a FEMA request that journalists not photograph dead bodies found in Louisiana, I actually understood the basic reasoning. There are a lot of families with missing loved ones and no one wants to learn of a friend or family member’s death by seeing a body on CNN. Besides, I thought, this “preference” lacks teeth — short of confiscating cameras, there’s not much the American government can do to stop American journalists from covering a story on American soil anyway.
I guess I “mis-underestimated” them again.
As Josh, Kevin, and others have noted, the administration has cracked down on the media’s coverage of the Katrina devastation in a big way.
First, it was the ban on photographs. This was followed by the National Guard receiving orders to turn away all media trying to get access to New Orleans; FEMA warning firefighters not to talk to reporters; and NBC’s Brian Williams being shuffled away from his location because he was attempting to take pictures of a National Guard unit taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the French Quarter.
As Josh put it, it’s now “pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.”
“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 force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what’s happening in the city.”
Given everything that’s happened since the storm struck the Gulf Coast, I’d say this all makes a lot of sense.
As near as I can tell, Bush has two Katrina-related problems: the failure to respond appropriately to the hurricane and the public’s awareness of his failure. By cracking down on a free press, the administration is addressing at least one of its ongoing dilemmas.
Why is this happening now, as opposed to immediately after Katrina hit? Because, early on, the media wasn’t being terribly aggressive — in fact, it seemed ready to give Bush a pass.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux and pressed him about the issue of the levee funding. Blitzer wanted to know specifically who was responsible for not getting the job done: “Who resisted? Was it the Clinton administration?” (Emphasis added.) Blitzer never bothered to ask about the Bush administration’s role in neglecting the levees.
Last week, while the federal relief efforts unraveled, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews cheered, “Last night, we showed you the full force of a superpower government going to the rescue.” His report would have been more impressive (not to mention more accurate) if a superpower government had actually gone to the rescue at the time.
And here’s how the Washington Post, in a Sept. 1 editorial that should live in infamy, described the administration’s disaster relief: “So far, the federal government’s immediate response to the destruction of one of the nation’s most historic cities does seem commensurate with the scale of the disaster.”
Three days later David Broder, the dean of the D.C. press corps, also came to Bush’s aid, suggesting that the turmoil in New Orleans represented “an advantageous setting” for the president and that his handling of the situation would open “new opportunities for him to regain his standing with the public.”
The administration didn’t crack down, in other words, until they thought it was necessary. And it became necessary as soon as journalists started reporting from the scene itself and saw, first hand, the disastrous federal response to this nightmare.
In this sense, as Michael Froomkin noted, the assault on the free press follows a certain twisted logic: “If the thing that is most responsible for Bush’s bad week is the bad TV images, and the reporters who saw with their own eyes that he and his underlings were lying — then surely the answer is to remove the reporters from the picture so we can all get back to spinning as usual.”