CBS report renews calls for NOAA accountability
CBS focuses on excessive fines, abusive enforcement, lack of oversight
By Richard Gaines Staff Writer
A nationally televised report has told the world of the travails of the Gloucester-based fishing industry at the hands of government regulators.
Featuring testimony from longtime port of Gloucester fishermen Bill Lee and Richard Burgess, the CBS News report broadcast Wednesday night marked the first extended network coverage of a struggle that was joined with the start of the Obama administration and has built in intensity for two years
The grievances against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service trace back more than a decade, as the federal Commerce Department inspector general has acknowledged.
The report by CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian covered issues that readers of the Times have been immersed in — stultifying overregulation and vindictive, debilitating law enforcement, which together put small businessmen out of business — but CBS also added a new perspective.
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