From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. Over the past few weeks, some news organizations have reported a disturbing trend.

They say they've been denied access to beaches near and the airspace over the Gulf oil spill,

denied access by British Petroleum employees. BP is, of course, the company

responsible for the spill. A CBS news crew trying to reach an oil-soaked beach taped an incident

documenting the problem. Near the end of the clip, you hear a faraway voice saying, this is BP's

rules, not ours. When we tried to reach the beach, a boat of BP

contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest.

Just the suggestion that BP is making decisions about the movements of journalists caused an outcry, and by midweek,

the Coast Guard had stepped in to clarify its media policy and to reiterate that BP is definitely not

making the rules. But by that point, a few journalists had already been running in circles,

including Times-Picayune photojournalist Ted Jackson,

trying to do a routine flyover. Jackson had hired a seaplane to get aerial shots of the spill.

Typically, you call the FAA and request permission to get below the temporary flight restriction,

and the flight restriction that day was 3,000 feet, which is way

too high to make a picture. So we requested to be able to fly lower than that, and the authority

asked who was on the flight, and he said, I have the Times-Pickeen photographer, and the answer was

immediately no, then. You cannot have this exemption.

The seaplane company owner asked him,

can I get your name so I can put your name in the file of people who are denying this request?

He told him his name, and he said that he was a BP contractor hired to handle aviation

request.

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