A great piece in The New York Times today on BP's continued efforts to keep information and access from the press, while spending millions on self-promotion via television spots and newspaper ads.

“When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request,” the Times wrote. “A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied."

The story goes on to tally several examples of such censorship, which I have documented here on numerous occasions.

“Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials,” the story adds. “To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees.”

Among those quoted, Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, who compared it to reporters embedded with the military: “There is a continued effort to keep control over the access. And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it's still a problem because it's still access obtained through the government.”

Where is the outcry from news organziations?