ETHICS CORNER

By Allan Wolper

JUNE 11, 2003

Handout Photos Don't Tell the Whole Story

Media Gets Less Access at White House

The picture was propaganda-perfect.

It showed President Bush holding the hand of Army Sgt. First Class Thomas Douglas as the wounded soldier lay in a Walter Reed Hospital bed in Washington, D.C., recovering from the bullet wounds that earned him a Purple Heart in the Iraq war.

Eric Draper, who is George Bush's personal photographer, took the poignant photo last April 11 and developed it in a darkroom at Anacostia Naval Station in Washington, D.C. It was then sent to the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

The wire services -- behaving like adjuncts of the White House -- distributed the staged hospital scenes, and noted in their captions that the photos were handouts.

But the great majority of readers who saw the image didn't know where it really came from or who took it, because it was published with either an AP or AFP or Reuters credit, giving it a credibility that it didn't deserve. I became interested in this shell game after The New York Times and the New York Daily News were delivered to my door.

The Times published the hospital picture on its front page without an accompanying story. It identified the photographer as "Eric Draper/White House" -- an ambiguous credit, at best.

"Giving proper credit is a very sensitive issue," said Dave Frank, the Times' deputy picture editor. "It is very important to tell our readers where the picture originates from."

True, but the Times credit did not indicate whether Draper was working for the White House, or at the White House for The New York Times.

The Daily News ran the same picture that appeared in the Times with an AP credit, leading its readers to believe that the photo was taken by a wire service photographer. Eric Meskauskas, the Daily News' director of photography, conceded the credit was misleading. "No one ever mentioned it before," Meskauskas said. "But it is an interesting point. We're going to re-examine our policy about wire service handouts."

Both newspapers would serve their readers better if they told the White House they won't be publishing any more handout photos. They won't do this, of course, because it will be difficult to get anyone else to go along with them.

What this means is that the public gets a distorted, Rose-Garden picture of the Bush Presidency -- aided and abetted by the news organizations it counts on to provide them with an independent account of White House behavior.

"We are between a rock and a hard place," said Michel duCille, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner at The Miami Herald before becoming photography editor of The Washington Post in 1988. "Sure, we could boycott them. But it won't stop anything. The wires will still send out the photos.

"We should be capturing our images with our photographers," duCille added. "We should be making our own journalistic decision making. We are getting pictures that the White House wants us to have. They wouldn't give us something if it made them look bad."

Translation: The White House would not have sent out any photos of Sgt. Douglas if he had sat up in his bed and told President Bush he thought the war in Iraq was a waste of American lives.

Nor would there have been a story on the exchange. Print reporters were not allowed to follow the president into Douglas' private room or his visit to a nearby ward. Even though every president works at controlling access to him, it appears the second Bush White House has outperformed its predecessors.

Susan Walsh, president of the White House News Press Association and an AP photographer, believes the situation might change if the public knows it is being fed a sanitized vision of White House behavior. "We don't take the team pictures from the Dallas Cowboys," she said, referring to the AP. "We put our foot down on them. We should do the same thing with the White House. "We are getting less and less access."

It seems the Bush White House is wearing down the press corps. Donna Douglas, wife of the soldier that Bush visited, said few reporters bothered to call her after the White House photo was released of her husband and the President.

"We received a call from The Fayetteville Observer," she told me, referring to the North Carolina paper that covers Fort Bragg, where her husband is stationed. "We told them that we weren't giving out any interviews. The New York Times also called and we told them the same thing. They asked if they could use the photo, and we said they could."

Newspapers are not supposed to be that sensitive. They are supposed to watch the presidency, not become part of it. They are supposed to show the truth, as well as tell it. They are supposed to be watch dogs, not Labrador Retrievers.

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Allan Wolper (allanwolper@msn.com) is a contributing editor to E&P.

...how much of what you see is staged and how much is true?

C'mon - if the Press is so "Liberal" why aren't they all over Bushie like "stink on shit"?

...is some smelly stuff. The Bush Junta is so bad they could knock a Buzzard off a' Shit Wagon. (With apologies to George Carlin)

How quick those on the left are to blame anyone trying to help.

KOBE Youth member meets KOBE leader.

Who do you believe? http://www.vestedowl.com/editor_june.htm

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