US officials accused of censoring images of the dead

US officials have been accused of trying to censor free speech by asking the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped US military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said.

Larry Siems of the PEN American Centre, an authors’ group that defends free expression, said: “It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story.”

US newspapers, television outlets and websites have featured pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.

But FEMA has refused to take reporters and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up valuable space needed in the recovery effort, and asked them not to take pictures of the dead.

In an email explaining the decision, a FEMA spokeswoman wrote: “The recovery of victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect, and we have requested that no photographs of the deceased by made by the media.”

Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press found this stance inexplicable.

“The notion that, when there’s very little information from FEMA, that they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply mind-boggling,” she said.

“You cannot report on the disaster and give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don’t see that there are bodies as well.”

Efforts to recover bodies continue. Out in the city’s filthy waters, rescue teams tied bodies to trees or fences when they found them and noted the location for later recovery before carrying on in search of survivors.

Tom Rosenstiel of Columbia University’s journalism school said FEMA’s refusal to take journalists along on recovery missions meant that media workers would go on their own. He said the policy was “an invitation to chaos.”