BP Colluding with Government on Media Censorship?

CBS offered up a video clip this morning showing a boat of BP contractors riding with two Coast Guard officers allegedly threatening the media with arrest if they tried to document oil damage in South Pass, Louisiana.

Says the pilot: “This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours.”

Besides demanding a hard look at the line between collusion and cooperation, these stills also call for a blunt examination of how much BP is leveraging the crisis (and its central management of it) primarily to blunt, stall or mitigate perceptual damage to the corporation.

Our “fire breathing BP” post earlier this week — featuring a Reuters photo ever-so-subtly mocking the company for the way its been holding court — highlights how much deference has been paid to BP while it tries to control the spigot.

What happened to public rules?