[Previous entry: "Genes Show Signs Brain Still Evolving"] [Next entry: "Four Killed in Partisan Violence in Jamaica"]

09/09/2005:

"Advance Men in Charge"

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it didn't want the news media taking photographs of the dead in New Orleans. A FEMA spokeswoman talked unconvincingly about the dignity of the dead. But the bizarre demand, a creepy echo of the ban on news media coverage of the coffins returning from Iraq, is simply the latest spasm of a gutted federal agency.

It's not really all that surprising that the officials who run FEMA are stressing that all-important emergency response function: the public relations campaign. As it turns out, that's all they really have experience at doing.
nytimes.com