FEMA doesn't want you to see dead bodies in NO

NEW ORLEANS (Sept. 7) - When U.S. officials asked the media not to take
pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they
were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs
said on Wednesday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the
Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military
coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate
telephone interviews.

"It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject
is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of
the story," said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors'
group that defends free expression.

U.S. newspapers, television outlets and Web sites have featured
pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.

But on Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers along
on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up
valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not to take
pictures of the dead .

In an e-mail explaining the decision, a FEMA spokeswoman wrote: " The
recovery of victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost
respect and we have requested that no photographs of the deceased by
made by the media."

Efforts to recover bodies continued on Wednesday. Out in the city's
filthy waters, rescue teams tied bodies to trees or fences when they
found them and noted the location for later recovery before carrying on
in search of survivors.

Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
found this stance inexplicable.

"The notion that, when there's very little information from FEMA, that
they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the
reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply
mind-boggling," Daugherty said. "You cannot report on the disaster and
give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don't see
that there are bodies as well."

FEMA's policy of excluding media from recovery expeditions in New
Orleans is "an invitation to chaos," according to Tom Rosenstiel,
director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of
Columbia University's journalism school.

"This is about managing images and not public taste or human dignity,"
Rosenstiel said. He said FEMA's refusal to take journalists along on
recovery missions meant that media workers would go on their own.

Rosenstiel also noted that U.S. media, especially U.S. television
outlets, are generally reluctant to show corpses.

"By and large, American television is the most sanitized television in
the world," he said. "They are less likely to show bodies, they are
less likely to show graphic images of the dead than any television in
the world."

There is also a question of what the American PEN Center's Siems called
"international equity," noting that American news outlets cover stories
around the world showing the effects of natural disasters and wars in
graphic detail.

"How is the world going to look at us if we go into their part of the
world and we broadcast these images and we do not allow ourselves to
look at such images when they're right in our own midst?" Siems said.

Mark Tapscott, a former editor at the Washington Times newspaper who
now deals with media issues at the Heritage Foundation, said the FEMA
decision did not amount to censorship.

"Let's not make a common decency issue into a censorship issue,"
Tapscott said. "Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and see their
dead uncle on the front page. That's just common decency."

.

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