Passive voice in journalism, again
By The Seattle PI has a relatively unremarkable story on the economic fallout of the recent oil spill in The Aleutians today. Short-term influx of work, dollars, and filled hotel rooms, tempered by concerns about long-term damage, nothing too surprising.
One passage did manage to cause my eyebrow to raise, ever so slightly:
No photos of oiled animals, alive or dead, have been allowed in Dutch Harbor, where small numbers of carcasses have been delivered almost daily in sealed boxes. Coast Guard representatives have said it simply is a matter of controlled information flow, that the wreck is being handled similar to a wildfire emergency or a flood.
Rescued live animals can be photographed in Anchorage, wildlife officials noted.
To some, it appears to be an attempt by private industry and a compliant federal government to avoid the negative political fallout from images of dead birds and oiled beaches.
“It seems pretty obvious,” said one worker sitting in a bar.
Maybe I’m remembering things incorrectly, but this certainly seems to be a rather remarkable policy shift. But what I want to know is, who is doing the prohibiting? The Coast Guard and “private industry and a compliant federal government” are both hinted at as possible culprits, but Mike Lewis won’t say directly who is instituting this strange and troubling new policy. Given that it’s a restriction on journalists–his colleagues–that’s wholly unjustifyable for any non-propagandistic reasons, you’d think he’d be willing to tell us.