Magazine Alters Photo of the President

In our chapter on mass media, we discuss ways in which technological developments have affected journalism. Because it is now so easy to alter photographs, news organizations now confront photography increasingly presents issues of ethics and accuracy. The New York Times reports:

It was the ideal metaphor for a politically troubled president.

There was President Obama on the cover of the June 19 issue of The Economist, standing alone on a Louisiana beach, head down, looking forlornly at the ground.

The problem was, he was not actually alone. The photograph was just edited to make it look that way.

The unaltered image, shot on May 28 by a Reuters photographer, Larry Downing, shows Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard and Charlotte Randolph, a local parish president, standing alongside the president. But in the image that appeared on The Economist’s cover, Admiral Allen and Ms. Randolph had been scrubbed out, replaced by the blue water of the Gulf of Mexico.

At Daily Kos, Jed Lewison is critical:

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but there's really no excuse for bending facts to support a narrative. Digital image processing can be a great way to make a point, but it's wrong to create a fake image and pass it off as real to an unsuspecting audience. That's the kind of thing we'd expect from the Iranian government -- and they really aren't the guys you want to emulate.

At Politics Daily, Walter Shapiro is less concerned:

We all live in a Photoshopped century. Unfeigned reality has become a rarity at the upper levels of politics and celebrity. Sometimes it seems like the "authors" of half the books on the nonfiction bestseller list did little more than hire an expensive ghostwriter and grudgingly answer some questions into a tape recorder. Believing in a model political marriage (Al Gore, this carbon offset is for you) is truly the triumph of hope over experience. On cable TV, the political discourse is dominated by hosts (soon to include the disgraced Eliot Spitzer) who exude the kind of ideological certainty about everything that used to be associated only with heavy brainwashing.

White House image-makers would not allow FDR to be photographed in a wheelchair, presidential pictures have almost always been a triumph of stagecraft.

Court Halts Drilling Moratorium

Stateline reports:

Government officials in Gulf states praised a federal judge's ruling Tuesday lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling, while the Obama administration vowed to appeal it.

In May, as the catastrophic BP oil spill spiraled out of control, the administration called a halt to deepwater projects and suspended drilling in 33 exploratory wells, the Associated Press reported. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour and his Louisiana counterpart, Bobby Jindal, both Republicans, complained that the moratorium would cost their states jobs.

On Tuesday, Barbour hailed the ruling. "Hopefully, the judge's ruling will go into effect quickly and be upheld on upheal," he said. "The moratorium is bad policy."

On his Facebook page, Jindal called the ruling "welcome news to Louisianans whose jobs were threatened by the 'arbitrary and capricious' moratorium."

The text of the ruling is here.

The story illustrates key facets of American government.

• The first is the role of the judiciary, which may sometimes check actions by the other branches. As Tocqueville wrote, "There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."
• The second is federalism. The perspectives of governors are different from those of presidents.
• The third is party politics. Republicans have been critical of President Obama's handling of the Gulf oil spill, just as Democrats were critical of President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina.

A Federalism Problem

A few days ago, David Brooks wrote of the Gulf oil spill:

In article after article, you see local officials exploding in anger. Bill McCollum, Florida’s attorney general, has called himself “absolutely appalled.” Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said this week, “We are not winning this war.”

The county commissioners in Okaloosa County, Fla., got so fed up with outside interference that they unanimously voted to give their emergency management team the power to do whatever it wants. “We made the decision legislatively to break the laws if necessary,” Chairman Wayne Harris told The Northwest Florida Daily News.

Some of this rage is unavoidable when you have a crisis that no one can control. But it’s also clear that we have a federalism problem. All around the region there are local officials who think they know their towns best. They feel insulted by a distant and opaque bureaucracy lurking above.

The balance between federal oversight and local control is off-kilter. We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart, but who are really distant. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground.

"First Reports Are Always Wrong"

Our chapter on mass media cautions against putting too much trust in early press reports of an event, especially a catastrophic one: "Errors are likely in the chaos of disaster." Even when journalists accurately convey official statements, those statements may themselves be mistaken. The attempt to stop the Gulf oil spill is a case study.

Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2010:

Engineers have stopped the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government's top oil spill commander, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.

The "top kill" effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, has pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well is very low, but persists, he said.

Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2010:

A top Obama administration official warned Sunday that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill might not be stopped until late summer after BP's latest attempt to plug the leak failed.

The "American people need to know" that it's "possible we will have oil leaking from this well until August, when the relief wells will be finished," said Carol Browner, the White House energy advisor.

In the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "first reports are always wrong."