{"id":185497,"date":"2014-11-03T21:13:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T02:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/11\/03\/what-a-surprise-the-no-fly-zone-over-ferguson-was-about-restricting-press-access\/"},"modified":"2014-11-03T21:13:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T02:13:00","slug":"what-a-surprise-the-no-fly-zone-over-ferguson-was-about-restricting-press-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/11\/03\/what-a-surprise-the-no-fly-zone-over-ferguson-was-about-restricting-press-access\/","title":{"rendered":"What a Surprise, the No Fly Zone over Ferguson was About Restricting Press Access"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was patently obvious at the time, but now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/03\/us\/police-targeted-media-with-no-fly-zone-over-ferguson-tapes-show.html\">we have evidence on tape<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The federal government agreed in August to a request by the police to restrict about 37 square miles of airspace over Ferguson, Mo., for 12 days for what they said were safety concerns, but audio recordings show that the local authorities privately acknowledged that the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, the agency\u2019s air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to allow commercial flights to operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and for police helicopters to fly through the area \u2014 while still prohibiting flights.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cThey finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,\u201d one administration manager said about the St. Louis County Police Department in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. \u201cBut they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">At another point, referring to the temporary flight restriction, a manager at the administration\u2019s center in Kansas City, Mo., said the police \u201cdid not care if you ran commercial traffic through this T.F.R. all day long. They didn\u2019t want media in there.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Seriously, this is America, and this is not acceptable.<\/p>\n<p>Not only do we need to disband the Ferguson PD, we probably need to do it for the St. Louis County PD as well.<\/p>\n<p>These are ineluctably corrupt organizations.<\/p>\n<p>They cannot be fixed.&nbsp; They need to be shut down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was patently obvious at the time, but now we have evidence on tape: The federal government agreed in August to a request by the police to restrict about 37 square miles of airspace over Ferguson, Mo., for 12 days for what they said were safety concerns, but audio recordings show that the local authorities &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1041,1064,985,1035],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-media","category-regulation","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185497"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}