Media blackout pt. II

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 8:02 AM on September 8, 2005.

Yesterday we looked at the suspicious actions of FEMA, working tirelessly to whitewash their failure and now...

Peek guest blogger Lindsay Beyerstein is down in Louisiana with Bob Brigham of the Swing State Project who writes:

"We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they're TV trucks around. Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city."

"At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history."

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.