SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE / SF GATE
As bodies recovered, reporters are told 'no photos, no stories'
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Cecilia M. Vega, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
New Orleans -- A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans' Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter.
Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside.
Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a member of the Army 82nd Airborne Division summoned a reporter and photographer standing nearby and told them that if they took pictures or wrote a story about the body recovery process, he would take away their press credentials and kick them out of the state.
"No photos. No stories," said the man, wearing camouflage fatigues and a red beret.
On Saturday, after being challenged in court by CNN, the Bush administration agreed not to prevent the news media from following the effort to recover the bodies of Hurricane Katrina victims.
But on Monday, in the Bywater district, that assurance wasn't being followed. The 82nd Airborne soldier told reporters the Army had a policy that requires media to be 300 meters -- more than three football fields in length -- away from the scene of body recoveries in New Orleans. If reporters wrote stories or took pictures of body recoveries, they would be reported and face consequences, he said, including a loss of access for up-close coverage of certain military operations.
Dean Nugent, of the Louisiana State Coroner's Department, who accompanied the soldier, added that it wasn't safe to be in Bywater. "They'll kill you out here," he said, referring to the few residents who have continued to defy mandatory evacuation orders and remain in their homes."
"The cockroaches come out at night," he said of the residents. "This is one of the worst places in the country. You should not be here. Especially you," he told a female reporter.
Nugent, who is white, acknowledged he wasn't personally familiar with the poor, black neighborhood, saying he only knew of it by reputation.
Later Monday, the recovery team collected a body from a green house on St. Anthony Street in nearby Seventh Ward. The dead man, who was slipped into a black body bag and carried out to one of the white vans, had been lying alone on the living room floor for nearly two weeks, neighbors said.
"I told them weeks ago he was in there," said Barry Dominguez, 39, who lives across the street and has refused to leave the neighborhood he grew up in.
After the recovery team took away the St. Anthony Street body, two workers urinated on the side of a neighbor's house.
The CNN suit was in response to comments Friday at a news conference in which officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency said members of the news media would not be allowed to witness the recovery of hurricane victims' bodies.
Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security director, had said Friday that the recovery effort would be done with dignity, "meaning that there would be no press allowed." Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore later said there would be zero access to the recovery operation.
During a hearing Saturday morning in U.S. District Court in Houston, a lawyer who represented the government said FEMA had revised its previous plans to limit coverage.
Government agencies may still refuse requests from members of the media to ride along, or be "embedded," on recovery boats as crews gather the dead. "But, to the extent the press can go out to the locations, they're free to do that," said Keith Wyatt, an assistant U.S. attorney, according to a transcript of the hearing. "They're free to take whatever pictures they can take."
Army Lt. Col. Richard Steele said the government's position as explained in court Saturday didn't represent a change in policy. Reporters can watch recovery efforts they come upon, but they won't be embedded with search teams.
"We're not going to bar, impede or prevent" the media from telling the story, he said. "We're just not going to give the media a ride."
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Interesting article, interesting debate. Certainly smells of "none of your business" but the "get out of our way so we can do our job" and "please respect the dead" makes sense too.
BTW, I can't help but also accuse the Chronicle of a little bias in the article. Evidence...
"Nugent, who is white, acknowledged he wasn't personally familiar with the poor, black neighborhood, saying he only knew of it by reputation"
--> Uh, how is that relevant to his point that the neighborhood is dangerous. I'm not familiar with downtown Mogadishu, but I can tell you its not safe!
"After the recovery team took away the St. Anthony Street body, two workers urinated on the side of a neighbor's house"
--> Uh, last I read, NOLA has no running water. Where do you want them to go? How is this friggin relevant?
Sorry, there's just so much discussion here of the biased right wing news agencies, I couldn't help but point out a few blatant cheap shots by the left.
That as the right wing media starts apologizing for Bush by saying the death count may not be high, that we find out the press is censored by the govt WRT to the counting of the dead?
yes i do find it suspicious. i don't trust either side. that was sorta my point.
do you find the comments i cited from the article that the writer perhaps was biased against the feds?
-- Modified on 9/14/2005 6:07:42 PM
The article was a report. It reporte both sides of the story. I didn't see any opinions stated.
Do you have a different slant on what you mean by bias?
Tone is everything. How else do you explain how the reporter felt compelled to report, objectively, that the soldier "urinated on the house" and "admitted he'd never been to such neighborhood". Absolutely irrelevant to the story and clearly attempts to impugn the person in question. Read my post above.
We, as American citizens, should have the right to see (to a certain extent) the total aftermath of this disaster, which includes death. I don't believe this should be censored. However, those who died do deserve not to be sensationalized as part of the story.
I don't think there's really any satisfactory way to do both at the same time without having some sort of objections. It's definitely a delicate balancing act.
Censoring reporters on foreign soil in a war zone on foreign soil is one thing. Censoring them on American soil is a blatant attack on free speech.
I think they're trying to cover up the death toll, which must be rising very quickly. I, unfortunately, have the feeling that Bush got contrite yesterday because the other shoe is about to drop-- if the news isn't censored or bottled, I think they are going have something like 20,000 dead.
They'll only buffer the impact. They are opening parts of the city next week. If the body count is really large, I think that they are trying to see that it dribbles out gradually, putting it between frequent dollops of good news about the recovery.
Control over the news is 90 percent of the previous success of this administration. So, I think of course they are trying to manipulate it for damage control.
Soon I'm going to be hearing from conservatives: "a lot of good things are happening in New Orleans, but the mainstream media just doesn't report it." They'll give this statement out to a few talk show hosts and a couple bloggers to get the ball rolling, and soon conservatives will muster their defenses around it.
I hope it was an over estimate of what they'd need, but how can we ever know now ?
http://webtv.theeroticreview.com/msgBoard/viewmsg.asp?MessageID=24340&boardID=39&page=2
and
http://webtv.theeroticreview.com/msgBoard/viewmsg.asp?MessageID=24339&boardID=39&page=2
I hadn't realized that they upped it to 40,000.
However, I knew the predictons of loss of life prior for this calamity was 100,000. It wasn't a direct hit with a type 5 hurricane, though, which is why it likely won't run that high.
And the reporting in that gruesome week after the hurricane hit told of bodies floating in the water everywhere. So, there were many dead that could be seen.
Unfortunately, that's not including people who died in their homes, and the ones in their attics that rescue teams never got to.
And if 100-150 thousand people tried to ride this storm out, there weren't near that many at the Convention Center of the Superdome. There's a lot of people unaccounted for.
swollen, probably exploded drowned corpses???
Allow the feds to collect the bodies, hopefully identify them, and then the press can recognize their names. I pray there are not 40,000 or even 20,000 dea, not for Bushes sake....cause no matter the toll, he is doomed. I pray for all that is lost because of the deaths.
I doubt the reporters had that in mind either. Just accurate reporting about how many, and what and where they are being found. How many were trapped in attics, for instance.
And you also can't tell the difference between a ghoul and a pessimist.
that's a policy issue, and up to us to vote in/out who we want.
The 1st amendment only says they can't shut us up - doesn't in any way oblige the govt to release info.
Now the Freedom of Information Act gives them 10 days and as many exceptions to release documents. But that's not the constitution, and the Supremes have restricted it under the Patriot act.
You know, we get what we vote for.
Some things are assumed by writing a Constitution. Otherwise, how do you know the government wasn't lying when it ratified it? Or wrote it?
How many civilized parts of human relations need to be covered there? How can the citizens really decide how to vote if they can't get to the truth?
There's a conundrum to the way people think. The more major the authority, they more people trust it. The president is the highest authority in this country. Therefore, people tend to trust him most. Therefore, he has the most opportunity to lie. So, to foist some big lies off on the citizenry, you just have to get a liar into that office. Once he's there, he has so much authority on credit that people will follow him long after he's suspected of lying. Then they will follow him even after he is totally discredited just to deny the humiliation and loss they've incurred from trusting him.
I swear, I didn't know I was going to describe Bush's presidency to a T when I started to write that paragraph.
The reporters are there.
Maybe it will be no counting now...
no calculators....
and to the more mentally challenged (i.e. those from network TV), a mandate to wear mittens.
-- Modified on 9/15/2005 8:00:05 PM