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Critics Say Media Should Be Closer to StandoffBy Cara Tanamachi
Just as you had seen every day since the siege began Sunday. But what you can't see is dangerous, say people who have studied or covered such embattled and entrenched zealots. With the media kept at bay, say Dan Gifford and Amy Sommer Gifford, who documented the Branch Davidian inferno in Waco in a newly released movie, the public may never know what is really happening in the Davis Mountains. "Rodney King can tell you, if there's no one there to see it, it didn't happen," said Amy Sommer, who with her husband produced "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," now showing nationwide in select theaters. Reporters outside Fort Davis have complained to the Department of Public Safety about the lack of close access. DPS spokesman Mike Cox initially said his agency would consider taking a small group of reporters closer, but rejected the idea. In Waco, reporters were about a mile from the Mount Carmel compound, where they could see some of what was happening and saw the fire when it broke out. Reporters were not allowed to see the back side of the Mount Carmel complex where, the Giffords' film suggests, a tank rolled in with its machine gun firing to start the fire that killed more than 70 people. Stationed at a roadside rest stop perhaps 10 miles from McLaren's mountain enclave, where he, his wife and five others are cloistered and surrounded by Texas Rangers, more than 100 reporters and photographers try to report to the public what they can't see or hear. DPS officials say the distance from McLaren's enclave provides safety for reporters and keeps them from interfering with officers' maneuvers or strategy. "What you have to remember is that this is not a suburban area, and the roads are few, the terrain is rugged. It's West Texas," said Sherri Deatherage Green, DPS spokeswoman in Austin. "You have to understand that the fire station building that the SWAT team moved into, as sort of command post area, is still two miles away from where McLaren is. Even they aren't standing outside his door."
"When you're dealing with fringe groups, there's such a paranoid tendency anyway, and doing things like this just feeds that paranoia," said Walter, author of "Every Knee Shall Bow," a book chronicling the Ruby Ridge confrontation. "And the appearance that the government is hiding something is just as bad as hiding something.'' At Ruby Ridge, where reporters were kept about three miles away, FBI agents misled the media with wrong information and omissions, Walter said. As the public finally found out, the unarmed wife and son of fugitive Randy Weaver were killed by FBI snipers. ''We weren't told Weaver's wife had been shot until days after it happened,'' Walter said. "We were told Weaver had been threatening to shoot a helicopter, but, it turned out, they just walked out of their cabin, and the FBI started shooting.''
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FORT DAVIS -- On the sixth day of the Republic
of Texas standoff, all you saw were state police spokesmen addressing
a gaggle of reporters and photographers camped on the highway miles
from where Richard McLaren and his followers have dug in.
Jess Walter of Spokane, Wash., a former reporter
who covered the deadly standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 between
a white supremacist and his family and federal agents, said keeping
reporters at such a distance can be a dangerous tactic in the long term.