“Selfie” Non Scandal Proves Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

In an event that was not at all controversial this week, and barely, maybe for a hot second or two while cruising through Twitter, counts as interesting, President Obama was photographed taken a “selfie” of himself and the British and Danish prime ministers at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service. When I saw it, I expected the typical 60-90 minutes of not clever Twitter half-jokes about it, followed by a collective forgetting process as the next dumb photoshop or GIF came along.

Instead, the photo got several days worth of round-the-clock cable news coverage and a genuinely hilarious Andrea Peyser column for the ages (in the sense that it was trash). In a week where the House and Senate agreed to their first budget deal in years, a drone strike killed over a dozen members of a wedding party in Yemen by mistake, and . . . what was that thing again that Obama was in South Africa for? . . . oh right, Nelson Mandela’s memorial service took place, we can reasonably say that a few world leaders taking a photo was the biggest news story. (Rivaled, if anything, by a Fox News host saying she thinks Santa Claus is white.) And hey, here we are writing about it, too, so no judgment cast.

“It’s all about controlling the image and putting the president in the best light,” Mr. Mills [White House photographer for the Times] said. There’s no chance for a gaffe, or a bad hair day, or a sour expression, or much spontaneity when photographs are subject to approval by the presidential gatekeepers.

“There’s been a kind of creep, where even on innocuous events, the White House is calling it private and then pushing out a picture that’s taken by their own photographer,” said Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, who has 40 years’ experience as a photojournalist. (It is understood, he said, that acceptable photographic access would mean using “a tight pool” of three to five press photographers who would then share their images with other photojournalists.)

The White House’s attacks on the press and whistleblowers are of serious concern. Photos, though? We can agree in the abstract that if the White House was blocking photojournalists from covering important moments—an international summit or something—and choosing instead to rely entirely on its highly choreographed staff photographs, that’s a legitimate complaint. But look, already, at what Sullivan is singling out as the great matters of international import that the photo pool is missing: a “chance for a gaffe, or a bad hair day, or a sour expression, or much spontaneity.” They’re looking to fuck around with him—which is fun, but not something that’s going to get the public on its high horse about the First Amendment when it’s denied.

Similarly, look at the issue that Sullivan leads with to open her piece:

For Doug Mills—the longtime White House photographer for the Times—what happened on Veterans Day was more than annoying. It was wrong.

He and other Washington journalists had been hearing that the oldest World War II veteran alive was coming to Washington to commemorate the occasion. But they weren’t sure just what the 107-year-old Richard Overton’s precise coordinates would be.

As it turned out, he had a private breakfast with President Obama—undoubtedly a newsworthy event as well as one that cried out to be photographed.

But press photographers were not allowed to take that photo. Only Pete Souza, the government-employed photographer who works on the White House staff, was there. His photo of the president and the old soldier went out on Twitter and then was posted on Flickr, and from there the world could see it and distribute it.

“As a journalist, you feel you should be there, but we’re shut out,” Mr. Mills told me this week. “It’s very frustrating.”

It’s possible—likely, even—that I don’t know anything about photojournalism, but . . . a photo of Obama with an old man is a photo of Obama with an old man. Is Mills hoping that they could get a photo of Obama and the old man . . . looking silly or something? What if the old man croaked on the spot when overwhelmed by 10 photographers? That would make for some gaffe! Old man dies because of Obama’s bad hair day!

The photo pool hasn’t gotten this upset since earlier this year, when another world-historic accord was going down and it was barred access: Obama was playing a round of golf with Tiger Woods. The Washington Post was ON IT:

Carney reiterated the administration’s position that Obama was spending personal vacation time at a private hotel and did not leave the compound during his Sunday golf outing with Woods in Palm City, Fla. Reporters traveling with the president in the press pool had gathered in anticipation of potential access, but White House aides told them to disband because there would be no movement off the compound.

Later that afternoon, the White House confirmed that Woods was among Obama’s foursome after a reporter for Golf World Magazine and the Golf Channel had published the news on his Twitter feed hours earlier.

After several reporters, including Fox News correspondent Ed Henry, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, complained about the lack of access, Obama spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening on the way back to Washington. But that conversation was off the record.

Again: not exactly a controversial stiff-arming of the fourth estate. We wanted to see Obama putt with Tiger! Oh, well.

So, let’s ask some questions for both the Obama White House and the photo press corps:

• For the White House: Why do you care that someone’s going to take a photo of you with silly hair or putting with a known man-slut golfer? It’s not so bad to have people joke about you. It’s not going to destroy your presidency. Let them have their dumb photos more often, and then people won’t overreact so much when candid shots, like the selfie, do come out.

• For the photojournalists: Do you see what happens in this current media environment when you do get your candid shots, like the selfie? It ruins a full week of news, over nothing. Doesn’t this, in a way, prove the White House’s point about what happens when the press is granted more access: it wastes it on bullshit?

We’ll give you guys 30 minutes in timeout to resolve it.