http://www.alternet.org/environment/147236/4_ways_bp_and_officials_are_working_to_suppress_the_outrageous_facts_about_the_gulf_disaster/4 Ways BP and Officials Are Working to Suppress the Outrageous Facts About the Gulf Disaster
From intimidating reporters to trying to enforce no-fly zones, there seems to be a concerted effort to block public access to information.
June 17, 2010 |
With BP's oil gusher in the gulf approaching two months, public anger is approaching the boiling point. When will the oil spilling into the gulf be stopped and what remediation can be done for the ecosystem and the local economy? Those of us who aren't at ground zero have to rely on what the media is reporting -- which is turning into an outrageous scandal of its own.
"Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials," wrote Jeremy W. Peters for the New York Times. "To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees. Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP."
So what's really going on? Is there is concerted effort to block information from reaching the public? Here are four examples that point to a widespread effort to suppress public access to information about an environmental disaster -- we may still not yet know exactly how bad this thing is, or how bad it's going to get.
read:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/147236/4_ways_bp_and_officials_are_working_to_suppress_the_outrageous_facts_about_the_gulf_disaster/a bit more food for thought,
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175262/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_bp_and_the_pentagon%27s_dirty_little_secret__Tomgram: Nick Turse, BP and the Pentagon's Dirty Little Secret
Posted by Nick Turse at 11:00am, June 17, 2010.
<snip>
To make matters more complicated, as Nick Turse, TomDispatch regular and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, points out, America’s two distant disasters are not only out of control and seemingly unstaunchable, but more intimately connected than we might imagine. The American disaster in Afghanistan runs, in significant part, on BP-produced fuel, and government payments for that fuel are bolstering BP while it lives through its purgatory in the Gulf.
In addition, lest the American people learn the absolute worst, BP, evidently working hand-in-hand with the government, has put great effort into avoiding unnecessarily ugly photos, potentially negative stories, and unwanted information from the Gulf, by adopting methods of news control pioneered by the Pentagon in Iraq and Afghanistan. These include the “embedding” of reporters with government minders on public beaches, in the water, and in the air. It has even evidently become the norm in the Gulf now for officials to speak of reporters covering the scene as “media embeds.” In this way do our disparate disasters merge in corporate and government hands. Tom
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