9-08-05, 9:37 am
Just as it showed at the end of 2000 that those who control the counting and recounting of votes determine who 'wins' and election, the Bush administration is showing us that those who control and in effect censor media images 'invent reality.'
A story from Reuters announces that FEMA has banned the publication of photographs of New Orleans dead in order to respect privacy rights and for reasons of taste. Civil Liberties organizations are protesting as all of us should. Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the press said simply that 'when there is very little information coming from FEMA that they would even spend the time (on this issue) is mind-boggling.'
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism of the Columbia University School of Journalism said cogently that this is about managing images and not public taste or human dignity. Rosenstiel went on to say the US television, which is what Bush of course is worried about, is the most 'sanitized' in its showing of graphic violence, in the world. What will happen to America's international image when the footage of the dead is shown through the world while they are in effect censored in the US?
A better question might be: what will happen to the American people? When the Iran hostage crisis took place in 1979-1980, mass media pounced and created an 'America held hostage' mindset that helped propel Ronald Reagan into the presidency against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, who did not try to censor any images. Mass media treated the September 11 attacks as a sort of 'Remember Pearl Harbor' pep rally for the Bush administration and was in effect for less critical of Bush than conservative Republican dominated media were of Franklin Roosevelt after the Pearl Harbor attack. The graphic images of Vietnam War carnage were an important part of the shift in public opinion against Johnson’s war policy, even on George W. Bush, who went to great lengths to keep out of that war. While Johnson denounced his critics, he did not threaten to use the FCC against them, as Richard Nixon was to do in the later stages of the Vietnam War.
By the way, there was a news report that FEMA is issuing 'debit cards' worth $2,000 to victims of the disaster so they can purchase their own goods at stores near the shelters in which they have relocated. It might make more sense to begin to deal with the question of jobs and housing for the people, for whom such 'victims’ bonuses' won't go too far.
A New Deal-style reconstruction operation federally funded with affirmative action hiring policies aimed at providing work for those who have lost their jobs and homes would make much more sense. So would the sort of emergency housing construction launched at the beginning of WWII to provide housing for tens of thousands of workers who multiplied the populations of many communities as defense plants were rapidly expanded.
It also might make immediate sense to repeal the new repressive bankruptcy bill that Bush and the right-wing Republican Congress have passed, since there are now hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents who legitimately need to declare bankruptcy as a result of the disaster.
Without minimizing the horror of the September 11 attacks, the Gulf Coast Crisis has both cost, if press reports are accurate, many more lives, has done far more damage to the US economy, and is could be easier to cope with than a terrorist attack. Putting people in the Astrodome (the president’s Mother visited and said the people were used to such conditions and were fine) is not a serious answer.
Charity, the universal conservative answer, is no serious answer for the many thousands of victims either. Reconstructing New Orleans and providing jobs, housing, and a future for the people of the Gulf Coast through a national reconstruction program is the answer to this crisis and the best way to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
--Contact Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
