file photo: Wikimedia
When FAA officials agreed to ban flights above Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August, they knew the purpose was not for safety but to restrict media coverage of local street protests, The Associated Press reported on Monday. “They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” said one FAA manager, referring to a conversation with the St. Louis County Police, in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by the AP. A manager at the FAA’s Kansas City center said police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR all day long. They didn’t want media in there. … There is really … no option for a TFR that says, you know, ‘OK, everybody but the media is OK.'”
The recordings contradict claims by the St. Louis County Police Department that the restriction was solely for safety and had nothing to do with preventing media from witnessing the violence or the police response, the AP said. The street protests followed the death of Michael Brown, 18, who was shot during an encounter with local police. The AP obtained the tapes of the conversations via a Freedom of Information Act request. “They [the tapes] raise serious questions about whether police were trying to suppress aerial images of the demonstrations and the police response by violating the constitutional rights of journalists with tacit assistance by federal [FAA] officials,” said reporters Jack Gillum and Joan Lowy in the AP story.
