This article just spoke about people claiming FEMA is censoring the Katrina relief effort because they’re not allowing journalists on the boats with them as they comb the neighborhoods looking for survivors, but obviously finding numerous dead victims as well.
“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.
That’s part of the problem there Mr. Siems. The story isn’t or shouldn’t be about “death” it should be about the living and who’s made it to see another day and the recovery process. Flashing pictures of the dead everywhere doesn’t help anyone. It’s the same reason you can tell me a story about abortion without giving me the 8×10 glossies of the remains of the fetus after the procedure. Or wait, you might not want to do that because the public might be able to determine it may actually be a human life at that point and a few months later.
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.
Everyone complains about FEMA not doing enough, now when they get their and do the work, they want to get in their way so they can sell some more newspapers and get more advertising dollars.
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.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t have to see dead people laying around to get a “grasp” of the peril of this event. As I’m sure the relatives of the victims would prefer their family member’s 15 minutes not be in these details. Has Ms. Daugherty even seen what happens to a human body that’s been in the water that long herself? Let’s see how she would like it if we found pictures of her family members in a state of horrible death like that and put it on the front page.