Web Provides Banned Photos Media Couldn’t
Yesterday I wrote about a woman who lost her job because of a photo she took of coffins containing the remains of American soliders killed in Iraq. It appeared in the Seattle Times.
Today The New York Times and other papers across the country ran similar photos. It happened not because of an aggressive media, but because of an enterprising website. Here is what the New York Times wrote:
The Web site, (the Memory Hole), had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command’s decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.
The release of the photographs came one day after a contractor working for the Pentagon fired a woman who had taken photographs of coffins being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait. Her husband, a co-worker, was also fired after the pictures appeared in The Seattle Times on Sunday. The contractor, Maytag Aircraft, said the woman, Tami Silicio of Seattle, and her husband, David Landry, had “violated Department of Defense and company policies.”
Of course, this is another example of how the news media can see what’s happening on the Internet and in the blogosphere as an opportunity to improve the news coverage rather than a threat to it.
htttp://pjnet.org/weblogs/PJNettoday
