First Amendment Suspended in the Gulf

If the press is not allowed to report on something, did it happen? The government appears to believe it did not. [Link]

On Thursday, the Obama White House tightened its already stringent rules preventing news organizations from showing images of the damage done by the Gulf oil spill.

News photographers and reporters are no longer allowed to come within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms on the water or on beaches. As CNN's Anderson Cooper reported on his Thursday evening broadcast, "[I]n order to get closer, you have to get direct permission from the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans. You have to call up the guy. What this means is that oil-soaked birds on islands surrounded by boom, you can't get close enough to take that picture."

Cooper, hardly a voice of the right, was visibly perturbed by the restrictions, repeating several times during the program, "We are not the enemy here." A video clip from the program follows. In it, National Incident Commander Thad Allen offers up an explanation—to wit, security perimeters have been set up to ensure the safety of news crews. But Anderson, as you can see, isn't having any of it.

Readers are urged to arrive at their own conclusions, but it would be remiss of this writer not to point out the lack of response of any kind from other mainstream media outlets. The same journalists who were eager to film coffins containing the remains of American military personnel returning from the battlefields in Iraq have been curiously silent regarding this prohibition.