Just adding to the links: BP still trying to keep people from talking to the press. Jason Linkins update on media clampdown.

Still, the extent to which BP is suppressing coverage, with the co-operation of the federal government, has not really sunk in with most people.

Link is from an excellent front-page Daily Kos story by David Waldman (aka Kagro X), which unfortunately was posted on Friday evening of the holiday weekend. It puts a fork in the “leave President Obama aloooooone!” crowd by being real about what has so unnerved and disappointed the public about the administration’s response and tone:

What’s killing the White House image here is the notion that BP is able to use its money, power and influence in Louisiana to walk all over ordinary Americans and the government in dealing with a disaster of their own creation. That’s what stings the most. And there’s a real opportunity for the White House to grab the reins here and stake out territory where it really can assert leadership, and that’s in putting an end to this feudal-style nonsense that’s going on down there. Transparency in this situation has no enemies worth noting, and the reported extent of corporate usurpation of governmental powers is a shocking embarrassment. President Obama doesn’t need to come up with some magic trick for stopping the leak himself. He needs to put an end to the perception that the ridiculous shenanigans that appear to be surrounding the disaster are in any way acceptable or will be allowed to continue.

I think it’s time to look into Adm. Thad Allen’s connections to the industry…

This includes journalists and scientists. Guess BP owns the skies, too. More than time for someone in the oh-so-free press to put this administration on the hot seat: who asked the FAA to do this?

All that said, I think the odds are good that there are Coast Guard and/or BP memos suggesting journalists being ‘encouraged’ to join embedded response efforts; I think gung-ho CG personnel may have misinterpreted something like that as ‘required.’ While I didn’t quote this in the post above, Burkart said he’d received unconfirmed reports of similar stuff (“reports of cameras and cell phones being confiscated, scientists with monitoring equipment being turned away, and local reporters blocked from access to public lands impacted by the oil spill”). But this video is incontrovertible.

I think this incident and any others like it might be isolated incidents, but with both journalists and CG personnel obviously too willing to believe they are policy; thus, my emphasis was about how readily the CBS people went along with the frankly illegal demand, and by the same token how too readily the Obama administration is giving BP wide discretion to control information about this disaster in other ways.

————————

Well aside from the fact that it wasn’t true in Iraq, what exactly besides your imagination makes you think the Coast Guard construes embeds are the “only authorized form of journalism” in the GOM? Certainly not their statement, which says there are no rules prohibiting media access (except for safety and interference).

So…have you actually asked the Coast Guard? Asked a journalist? Why not?