On Thursday, the White House Correspondents’ Association and 37 news organizations submitted a letter to the press secretary, Jay Carney, protesting what photographers said amounted to the establishment of the White House’s own Soviet-style news service, which gets privileged access to Mr. Obama at the expense of journalists who cover the president.
So Friday the above, showing the Oval Office completely filled with press photographers, was the official photo of the day, like they're trying to be sarcastic or something. But they just prove the point of how Soviet they really are: everybody knows the press is free to shoot the president doing all that presidenty stuff. Booo-ring! But it's the White House employee Pete Souza that gets the truly newsworthy pix, like how Obama and Sasha went swimming in Florida once.
And you know why, right?
Totally Soviet-style! They have to have control over the image just in case Sasha gets purged and sent off to the labor camp, so they can Photoshop her out and pretend she never existed.
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| Pete Souza/White House, via The Atlantic. Originally a photograph of Obama with his then-close collaborator John Boehner; after the paranoid president decided Boehner had "betrayed" him one time too many, the Speaker's face was clumsily replaced with that of speechwriter Cody Keenan. Boehner's fate remains unknown—he's become an "un-person". |
