However, the Obama Administration and its practice of excluding photo journalist in favor of in house photographers to record official events is troublesome, at least IMO it is.
From the Washington Post opinion pages.
Is the Obama White House airbrushing history?
It was a hallmark of the Stalin era: Fallen Soviet leaders vanished from official photographs. Nobody accuses President Obama of such subterfuge (well, nobody except for those who believe he forged his birth certificate), but a change in longtime practice in the White House has raised questions about the integrity of images Americans see of their president.
The White House has increasingly excluded news photographers from Obama’s official events and is instead releasing images taken by in-house photographers, who are government employees. These photos often appear online and in newspapers, even though they lack the same standards of authenticity that govern those taken by photojournalists.
“As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the executive branch of government,” the White House Correspondents’ Association, joined by the Associated Press and other news organizations, wrote in a letter to White House press secretary Jay Carney last week. “You are, in effect, replacing independent photojournalism with visual press releases.”
New York Times photographer Doug Mills likens the administration’s actions to Tass, the Soviet Union’s news agency.
The most famous of the photo press releases was the image from the White House Situation Room on the day U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden; the image was digitally altered so that material on the table in front of the secretary of state could not be seen.
Maybe that alteration was an exception. And photojournalists don’t expect to be granted access to the Situation Room. But the doctored image raises the question of whether other photo releases are altered, too; in the age of Photoshop, it’s easy — at the start of the year, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s staff (clumsily) altered a group photo of Democratic women in Congress to add four absent members. And often, it’s undetectable. {Read More}
What say you?
Via: Memorandum
